IRS severs ties with ACORN over scandal

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You, along with conservatives, are tearing down ACORN and making it sound like a criminal organization. Turns out that the ACORN worker DID report to authorities and he got fired!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090922...en_camera_1;_ylt=AgXMxKhCuIA7eglloTqCdht0fNdF

I have totally lost respect for conservatives bent on destroying the intentions of ACORN - to provide voting rights for the poor and the disadvantaged by making it look like a criminal organization.

How the ACORN 'pimp and hooker' videos came to be - washingtonpost.com

ACORN has been around since 1970's and now all the sudden, the conservatives working so hard to destroy ACORN and have been wearing tinfoil hats thinking that Obama promotes the criminal activities.
 
The ACORN personnel cheerfully obliged, suggesting ways to defraud the bank, avoid tax payments by misstating income, and disguise the true nature of their activities. They were even advised to classify several of the under-age girls as "dependents" so the pair would qualify for the federal child tax credit. In one office an ACORN official even told Giles to classify her occupation as a "free lancer" and to bury any cash her business generated in the backyard.

This latest round of problems for ACORN may be the best documented, but they are not the first nor, for that matter, are they the most serious. A report issued last summer by the Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, according to Sunday's Washington Times, "presented evidence that ACORN had engaged in criminal misconduct."

Among the findings, the report said, ACORN:

Engaged in tax evasion, obstruction of justice and aiding and abetting a cover-up of nearly $1 million embezzled by Dale Rathke, brother of group founder Wade Rathke;

Committed investment fraud, depriving the public of the right to "honest services," and engaging in a racketeering enterprise affecting interstate commerce;

Conspired to defraud the United States by using taxpayer dollars for partisan political activities;

Submitted false filings to the Internal Revenue Service, and the U.S. Department of Labor; and,

Violated the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act.

Any one of these is a serious allegation. Taken together, they give ACORN most every appearance of being some sort of massive criminal enterprise worthy of a federal investigation of the sort made under the terms of the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act—or RICO. In fact the group and its affiliates are currently the target of more than a dozen lawsuits related to voter fraud in the 2008 election alone.

As a result of the increased public scrutiny of its actions, the Obama administration has "severed it ties" with ACORN, at least as far as allowing it to participate in the 2010 Census. The U.S. House and Senate are both voting as fast as they can to cut off federal funding of the group and more than one coalition has been created to ask state legislatures and governors to do likewise. ACORN's response began as a militant defiance of the criticism, likening it to the use of "Willie Horton" in the 1988 presidential campaign.
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The Case for ACORN as a Criminal Enterprise - Peter Roff (usnews.com)

A source with intimate knowledge of the allegations who asked not to be identified said 200 documents were delivered to congressional investigators.

Republican investigators on that committee found a fortnight ago that by "intentionally blurring the legal distinctions between 361 tax-exempt and non-exempt entities, ACORN diverts taxpayer and tax-exempt monies into partisan political activities." They recommended that ACORN be stripped of its jealously guarded tax-exempt status because it illegally spends taxpayer dollars on partisan activities, commits "systemic fraud," and violates racketeering and election laws.

ACORN is deeply involved in the labor movement.

Its far-flung empire of activism includes SEIU Locals 100 (Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas) and 880 (Illinois, Indiana), the Living Wage Resource Center (a website that tracks efforts by cities and states to raise the minimum wage above the federal standard), and various other groups concerned with labor-related issues. Organized labor is both a client and ally of ACORN. ACORN (including its affiliates) took in almost $3 million in 2007 from unions to assist unions with anti-corporate campaigns, provide strike support, and help with research and staffing, among other things. The group also had extensive ties to disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat who was thrown out of office this year by his state's legislature.

The congressional report from July also stated that ACORN submitted false filings to the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Department of Labor, in addition to violating the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Investigators found that ACORN failed to pay excise taxes and that "SEIU Local 100 -- under the direction of ACORN founder Wade Rathke -- filed bogus reports with the Labor Department in order to conceal embezzlement." The nearly million-dollar embezzlement in question was perpetrated by Rathke's brother around 2000 and covered up by Rathke and other ACORN leaders until last year. Wade Rathke remains chief organizer of SEIU Local 100 despite an ACORN national board resolution enacted last year that ordered him to sever all ties with the ACORN network.
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Even if the latest allegations don't lead to criminal charges, it's worth noting that the nation's largest community-based activist organization, which claims to defend the working class, has a record of profound, abiding hostility to the very same pro-labor laws it claims to support.

Although it supports the continued imposition of equal employment opportunity laws on the rest of America, it argued it shouldn't have to comply with those same laws. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had to sue ACORN in the 1990s 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.
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And for a group that poses as a champion of workers' rights, ACORN doesn't treat its own workers well. What follow below are just a few select examples from ACORN's sordid history of employee abuse.

The Industrial Workers of the World complained that Rathke's SEIU Local 100 sabotaged a union drive by employing union-busting techniques used by corporate America. In 2003 the National Labor Relations Board determined ACORN had unlawfully blocked its workers from organizing. (oooh! the irony...the irony!!)

Fed up with long hours and paltry pay, four ACORN organizers were canned by ACORN two days after they started a union certification drive against the group in Portland, Oregon. "We felt there was a lot of deceit in the organization," organizer Sarah Manowitz told Williamette Week. Employees reportedly worked 54 hours per week, including Saturdays, for annual pay of just $20,200. Two organizers said they were often paid late.

In 1995, ACORN sued the state of California seeking an exemption from the law that requires that it pay its own employees a minimum wage. The group treated its workers as if they were mendicant friars, arguing that keeping its employees in poverty helps to boost their zeal to help the poor. ACORN lost.

In 2006, $250-a-week 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.

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."

ACORN doesn't like paying its employees overtime. In 1996 the federal Department of Labor sued Citizens Consulting Inc. (CCI), a shadowy ACORN affiliate that traditionally took care of administrative matters for ACORN. The next year a federal court ordered CCI to cough up $10,000 in back wages.

ACORN has also been accused on flooding hospital emergency rooms with union goons demanding care in an effort to pressure hospitals to unionize.
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There are tons more here at:
The American Spectator : ACORN's Labor Pains
 
If ACORN commit scandal so it is wrong to do it, regardless on conservative or liberal.

I'm not conservative and never liked ACORN.
 
Mmm . . . A little off-topic here. Koko, I'm curious. What is a positive thing about President Obama?
 
ACORN is the "Robin Hood" in reverse by taking millions of dollars intended for the poor but gave it instead to politicians and themselves according to Washington Post. Realllly?

Documents released by a Senate Republican on Thursday show that leaders of the ACORN community organizing network transferred several million dollars in charitable and government money meant for the poor to arms of the group that have political and sometimes profit-making missions.

ACORN’s tax-exempt groups and allied organizations, long a target of conservative ire, used more than half their charitable and public money in 2006 to pay other ACORN affiliates, according to an analysis by the tax staff of Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa).
On Thursday, Grassley called the transactions a “big shell game” and said ACORN donors may be surprised by how the liberal group known for helping the poor obtain housing and health care was spending their money. He urged the Internal Revenue Service to take a closer look.

According to the Grassley report, charities “are being used to raise monies which are then funneled to other charities or to other organizations for purposes other than what the donor may have intended. . . . Dollars raised for charitable [purposes] appear to be used for impermissible lobbing and political activity.”
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washingtonpost.com

Reserve your complaints to WaPo this time.
 
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