Justin so right----------let's go back to ACORN. This is Obama's arm that helped get him elected while taking money from multiple sources. Remember the $800,000 plus paid by Obama to them----but hidden in the financial election reports and later called an accounting error------sure blame it on the accountant.
What did ACORN get in the Stimulus Package? Buried deep no doubt in the accounting------. mj
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From Politics For Pros sight----------
"From: Brumar89 1 Recommendation of 293427
ACORN operates through many groups with many names - they're all run by ACORN:
"ACORN's 1024 Elysian Fields Avenue address in New Orleans, Louisiana ... That address is the official headquarters for nearly 300 ACORN-affiliated groups."
ACORN's Money Tree Has Many Branches
Conservatives are on the march against the community organization ACORN, accusing its massive voter registration effort of fraud and faulting Obama for having any connections to the group. As we reported this morning, ACORN doesn't necessarily mind the attention.
But what exactly is ACORN? Actually, it's many, many things. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now has dozens of affiliated entities, from a home-buying assistance corporation to community radio stations to liberal research and training institutes. The giant web of ACORN organizations, primarily based in Louisiana, has been funded by a mix of labor union money, government grants (which really drive conservatives crazy) and charitable contributions from large foundations. See below for a breakdown of funding sources.
Plus, Project Vote -- the voter mobilization organization that works closely with and draws its leadership from ACORN -- paid ACORN and an affiliate $5.4 million in 2006. But where does Project Vote get its money? Normally it's hard to tell, but we obtained a 2006 tax return showing the nonprofit's funders, including: $4.5 million from the charitable trust of the investment management firm Vanguard; $425,000 from the Bauman Family Foundation, which also gives to the People for the American Way; and $396,000 from the liberal phone company Working Assets.
The breakdown on ACORN comes after the jump.
Union Money
ACORN's biggest union backer, the Service Employees International Union, gave more than $4 million to the community organization and its affiliates from 2006-07, according to Dept. of Labor filings. One SEIU local union, the Illinois Homecare Workers and Home Childcare Providers, sprouted from ACORN's organizing efforts and pays rent to ACORN.
ACORN's affiliates also pick up money from the Change to Win labor federation, the Food and Commercial Workers Union and the United Federation of Teachers, among others.
Government Grants
Much to the dismay of conservatives, the Department of Housing and Urban Development gave ACORN Housing Corp. $8.2 million from 2003 to 2006, according to USAspending.gov. ACORN Housing provides counseling, classes, and access to special loans to low-income homebuyers. HUD has given another $1.6 million to other ACORN affiliates since 2003.
The Environmental Protection Agency also chipped in, with $100,000 for ACORN's Louisiana Environmental Justice Project in 2004, for a program to rid homes of lead. The Republican National Committee wants a federal probe of ACORN. But the Justice Department has liked ACORN enough to give a New York ACORN affiliate $138,000 in 2005, for a juvenile delinquency prevention program.
Foundations
The foundations that give to ACORN & Co. vary widely. There are some classically liberal ones: The Bauman Family Foundation gave $350,000 to ACORN's American Institute for Social Justice. George Soros' Open Society Institute gave $300,000 to that institute and $250,000 to ACORN proper. The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation gave the institute $1.8 million.
But some of the biggest donors are mainstream foundations of big corporations, according to data from the Foundation Center. The JPMorgan Chase Foundation gave $2.4 million to ACORN Housing and the Bank of America Charitable Foundation gave $1.4 million. Citigroup's foundation gave $1.5 million to the social justice institute.
Other major donors include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gave $1.4 million for an education reform campaign. The Ford Foundation has given $1.3 million, including $257,000 this year for "public education and technical assistance to grassroots groups working to expand access to the Earned Income Tax Credit, living wage ordinances and paid sick days." Foundations affiliated with the late founder of the United Parcel Service gave a combined $6.4 million.
Individuals
The 527 organization Fund for America was set up last year by top liberal donors and operatives to help fund pro-Democratic organizations this election season, but it ended up folding. The Fund, itself bankrolled by George Soros and others, gave $200,000 to ACORN.
ACORN has also had its own affiliated 527s. Communities Voting Together, for example, was founded to "educate and mobilize low income voters in key communities in key battleground states in the run-up to the 2004 presidential elections, focusing on Latino and African-American neighborhoods." The group received $125,000 from film producer Jeanne Levy-Hinte; $100,000 from environmentalist donor John R. Hunting, whose wealth comes from the Steelcase office furniture company; $80,000 from the president of Working Assets, and $70,000 from Linda Pritzker of the Hyatt fortune.
There's a lot more to ACORN's financial picture that we can't complete here. ACORN's network is complex, and money often transfers from one affiliate to another, making it hard for outsiders to keep track of it all. But one thing is for sure: ACORN is busy.
-- Will Evans
npr.org
Lien on Me
By Matthew Vadum on 10.28.08 @ 1:48PM
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and its affiliates are content to impose crippling big-government laws, regulations, and taxes on Americans, but when called upon to obey those same rules, ACORN's network of scofflaws and deadbeats simply refuses to comply.
The most egregious example is the fact that more than 200 federal, state, and local tax liens adding up to more than $3 million have been filed against the ACORN network since 1989. All of these liens, which are only issued by creditor tax agencies after a tax debt has become seriously delinquent, are associated with ACORN's 1024 Elysian Fields Avenue address in New Orleans, Louisiana. That address is the official headquarters for nearly 300 ACORN-affiliated groups.
The most recent lien ($23,383) was filed by the IRS against an ACORN affiliate, American Workers Associates Inc., on Sept. 9. The largest lien ($547,312) was filed against ACORN itself by the IRS on March 10.
You may remember that during this year's primaries, the presidential campaign of Barack Obama paid $832,598 to Citizens Services Inc., an ACORN affiliated nonprofit registered in Louisiana, for get-out-the-vote activities. My research determined that ACORN affiliate Project Vote (a.k.a. Voting for America Inc.) also paid ACORN affiliate Citizens Services Inc. a total of $1,206,942 in 2005 and 2006.
Despite these huge cash injections, Citizens Services Inc. still can't make ends meet. Two liens filed against it in 2007 by Arkansas ($568) and Maryland ($357) remain outstanding.
Federal tax laws make it virtually impossible to find out what kinds of taxes the ACORN affiliates didn't feel like paying. As IRS spokesman Anthony Burke told me, "federal tax law precludes federal employees from disclosing tax return information." An exception to this is a federal tax lien filed at a county court house. That information may be public but "anything beyond that would be protected by the disclosure provisions of the federal tax law," Burke said.
Even though it's unclear what kinds of taxes ACORN and its affiliates failed to pay, because almost all ACORN affiliates are nonprofits that are exempted from paying most or all taxes, it seems likely that the liens were issued for non-payment of employees' payroll taxes, which are not covered under the tax-exemption.
Several accountants confirmed this view, saying the tax debts are probably related to delinquent payroll taxes. If so, this would be the ultimate irony because payroll taxes fund the social programs and wealth redistribution schemes that ACORN so ardently supports. (See Foundation Watch (pdf), November 2008.)
But ACORN's refusal to pay taxes is just the tip of the iceberg. The group has used the courts to wage war on the same worker protections it publicly supports.
ACORN stoutly defends the right of workers to organize unions, but the group doesn't like it when its own workers try to organize. It has tried to stop its own employees from signing up with unions, and in 2003 the National Labor Relations Board determined it had unlawfully blocked its workers from organizing.
ACORN supports raising the minimum wage and enacting so-called living wage policies, and claims it organized community and labor coalitions that succeeded in enacting living wage laws in 41 cities by the end of the 1990s.
Yet a 2003 study of ACORN by the Employment Policies Institute found the group paid a wage of $5.67 per hour, which was "less than half the level demanded by many proposed 'living wage' ordinances that ACORN supports."
And in 2006, $250-a-week Baltimore ACORN intern Sandra Stewart told Baltimore City Paper that the Baltimore chapter hadn't bothered to pay her for her work. Three other former ACORN workers told the paper that the group failed to pay them back wages.
In 1995, ACORN sued California seeking an exemption from the state law that requires it to pay its own employees a minimum wage. ACORN, which argued that keeping its employees in poverty helps to boost their zeal to help the poor, lost.
Even though it supports the continued imposition of equal employment opportunity laws on the rest of America, it argued in a separate lawsuit that same year that it shouldn't have to comply with those laws. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had to sue ACORN to force it comply with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the crown jewel of the civil rights movement's legislative accomplishments. (See Labor Watch (pdf), November 2008.)
Strangely, when ACORN fell victim to a theft, it just couldn't bring itself to trust the government to help resolve the matter. After founder Wade Rathke's brother Dale embezzled $948,000 from the group in 2000, ACORN refused to hand the matter over to government-run courts and instead embraced a refreshingly libertarian approach to dispute resolution.
Euphemistically calling the theft, which Wade Rathke covered up for eight years, a "misappropriation," ACORN allowed the Rathke family to pay private restitution at the rate of $30,000 per year. The founder disguised the missing funds as a loan to an officer on the ledgers of ACORN affiliate Citizens Consulting Inc. That affiliate, by the way, currently has a minimum of $112,597 in federal tax liens pending against it plus a $2,307 District of Columbia tax lien.
And these people want Americans to trust them to handle voter registration drives?
spectator.org " |
