Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (37 page)

One of Hanks’s friends, Louis Beverly, stood beside her on the porch. Beverly sported a distinctive acorn patch on his shirt—and wielded a pair of red-handled bolt cutters in his hands. With cameras rolling, Beverly used the tool to break a padlock on the front door. He then used his body as a battering ram to bust the door open and boldly declared:

“This is our house now!”

Hanks and her friends, many wearing identical t-shirts declaring a “foreclosure free zone” and advertising a hotline number, streamed into the home. The cameras followed. Hanks wistfully toured her old residence, lashed out at the bank for a few more minutes, and then put her own lock on the door to cap off the reclamation.

Bertha Lewis, the national president of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, praised Hanks for taking action to “liberate her home from the bank.”
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Louis Beverly, ACORN’s chief Baltimore housing activist, called it “civil disobedience” and “the right thing to do.”
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The Baltimore police called it fourth-degree burglary and charged both Beverly and Hanks with criminal trespassing.

President Obama, the community organizer-in-chief who cut his teeth as a street activist working with ACORN and its inextricably linked SEIU allies in Chicago, made no public comment. But the Left’s ground troops know exactly where their comrade in the White House stands. As Obama reminded ACORN leaders after its political action committee endorsed his presidential candidacy in February 2008:

I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That’s what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That’s the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.
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The Baltimore home invasion was part of ACORN’s aggressive pressure campaign for a nationwide foreclosure moratorium. It just happened to coincide with the White House launch of massive new government interventions in the housing market unveiled in February 2009. This was a cunning public relations stunt, complete with ACORN banners and apparel to intimidate lenders and recruit new members (the protesters’ T-shirts blared “1-866-67-ACORN.”) Donna Hanks was a seasoned ACORN activist who had successfully pimped her subprime sob story to national media outlets without even minimal vetting.

It would have been an opportune moment for the professionals in the mainstream media to illuminate ACORN’s trademark shakedown methods and shady activists. It would have been an opportune moment to remind the taxpaying public of how President Obama guaranteed these government-subsidized political operatives a seat at his table of power. “Before I even get inaugurated, during the transition, we’re going to be calling all of you in to help us shape the agenda,” Obama promised ACORN activists at a December 2007 Democratic presidential rally. “We’re going to be having meetings all across the country with community organizations so that you have input into the agenda of the next presidency of the United States of America.”
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But the mainstream media, continuing a decades-old pattern of whitewashing the radical left-wing outfit’s activities, failed to report the unvarnished truth about ACORN’s racketeers in Baltimore. Here are the facts:

Hanks bought the two-story home in the summer of 2001 for $87,000. At some point during the next five years, she re-financed the original home loan for $270,000. Where did all that money go? (Hint: Think house-sized ATM.) The property initially went into foreclosure proceedings in the spring of 2006. Hanks soon filed for bankruptcy and agreed to a Chapter 13 plan to pay back her bank and other creditors. In September 2006, the bankruptcy court ordered Hanks’s employer to deduct $340 per month from her salary to pay down the debt. Hanks did not comply with the legally binding plan. In December 2007, the loan servicer issued a notice of default on nearly $7,000 past due. While she was reneging on her mortgage IOUs, she managed to collect rent on her basement and rack up a criminal record on charges of theft and second-degree assault. The house was sold only after two years of court-negotiated attempts to allow Hanks to dig herself out of her debt hole.
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Baltimore ACORN leader Louis Beverly, who also claims to be a foreclosure victim, is a housing thug. He was charged with separate second-degree assault and property destruction in early 2009 and battery, assault, handgun possession, and possession of a deadly weapon with intent to injure in 1992. In 2006, he was slapped with a peace order. According to court records, he owned several rental properties in the Baltimore area and has for years been involved in civil cases alleging failure to maintain property, dumping, and uninhabitable conditions.
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The
Washington Post
spotlighted Beverly and Hanks’s activism without ever following up on their criminal records and financial negligence. The paper also shilled for ubiquitous ACORN foreclosure “victim” Veronica Peterson of Columbia, Maryland, recycling uncritically her accusation that she had been tricked into buying a $545,000 home by a broker who inflated her income and misrepresented her assets. “These loans were weapons of mass destruction,” the single mom of three and home daycare provider told the
Post
reporter on not being able to keep up with her mortgage bills. “They destroyed our credit, our lives, and they blew up in our face.”
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But a look at court and real estate records exposed the truth. Edward Ericcson, Jr., a reporter for the independent
Baltimore City Paper
,
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discovered that the “victim”—who took out a full mortgage with no down payment on a house she couldn’t afford—looks more like a predatory borrower.
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Amazingly, Peterson lived in the home more than year without paying rent or mortgage:

The online court and land records show that Peterson closed on the house on Nov. 3, 2006, with two loans from Washington Mutual. The main mortgage, for $436,000, had a starting interest rate of 8.5 percent, adjusting in December.... The second loan, often called a “piggyback,” totaled $109,000 with an interest rate of 11.25 percent. . . . Those two payments together would have totaled $3,386.17 per month. That’s before property taxes, upkeep, utilities, etc. Peterson would have to earn at least $50,000 per year just to make her house payments.
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The foreclosure was filed in July 2007. “The balance on the main note then was $435,735.86,” Ericcson reported, plus unpaid interest and late fees—suggesting she made at most one payment on the house. “Had she made all of her payments, Peterson would have spent about $64,335 so far. Had she rented a similar place, she would have been charged around $2,500 per month—a total of $47,500—since January 2007. Instead, she apparently paid nothing.”

These foreclosure con artists are just the tip of ACORN’s fraudulent enterprises. The non-profit ACORN, which takes in 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers after four decades on the public teat, has a long history of engaging in voter fraud, corporate shakedowns, partisan bullying, and pro-illegal immigration lobbying.
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This is the bread and butter work that ACORN does. President Obama knows it, and he appreciates it. He said so himself.

Despite his numerous on-the-record remarks tying himself to ACORN over the years, candidate Obama asserted on his “Fight the Smears” campaign website that he “never organized with ACORN.”
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According to ACORN, however, Obama trained its Chicago members in leadership seminars; in turn, ACORN volunteers worked on his campaigns.
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Obama also sat on the boards of the left-wing Woods Fund (with Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers) and Joyce Foundation, both of which poured money into ACORN’s coffers. ACORN head Maude Hurd gushed that Obama is the candidate who “best understands and can affect change on the issues ACORN cares about”
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—like ensuring their massive government pipeline to your hard-earned money.

Under the guise of “consumer advocacy,” ACORN has lined its pockets with both public and private money. The Department of Housing and Urban Development funds hundreds, if not thousands, of left-wing “anti-poverty” groups across the country with ACORN as a leading recipient of the agency’s subsidies. In October 2008 under the Bush administration, HUD announced more than $44 million in new housing counseling grants to over 400 state and local efforts. The Bush White House increased funding for housing counseling by 150 percent since 2001, despite the role most of these recipients play as activist satellites of the Democratic Party. The ACORN Housing Corporation received more than $1.6 million.
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ACORN is eligible for untold millions more in taxpayer funds from the trillion-dollar stimulus package that President Obama signed into law in February 2009 and the $6 billion National Service Act passed the following month.

Moreover, the ACORN Housing Corporation has worked to obtain mortgages for illegal aliens in partnership with Citibank. It relies on undocumented income, “under the table” money, which may not be reported to the Internal Revenue Service.
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Whistleblower documents reveal internal discussions among the group that blur the lines between its tax-exempt housing work and its aggressive electioneering activities. The group also targets corporate interests with relentless PR attacks, and then enters “no lobby” agreements with bullied corporations after receiving payment.
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The profound threat the group poses is not merely ideological or economic. It’s electoral. In March 2009, the Obama White House made good on its promise to give ACORN a hand in shaping the administration’s agenda when it designated the group an official partner of the U.S. Census Bureau. President Obama has entrusted ACORN—infamous for voter fraud scandals spanning more than a decade—to assist with the recruitment of the 1.4 million temporary workers needed to go door-to-door to count every person in the United States.
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At first, the administration denied that ACORN would play a substantial role in the census process. But documents obtained by Washington, D.C.-based watchdog Judicial Watch revealed in May 2009 “that the Census Bureau offered ACORN the opportunity to ‘recruit Census workers’ who would participate in the count. Moreover, as an ‘executive level’ partner, ACORN has the ability to ‘organize and/or serve as a member on a Complete Count Committee,’ which, according to Census documents, helps ‘develop and implement locally based outreach and recruitment campaigns.’”
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What could possibly go wrong?

SEE NO EMBEZZLEMENT, HEAR NO EMBEZZLEMENT, SPEAK NO EMBEZZLEMENT

At the intersection of the SEIU and ACORN stands Wade Rathke. The New Orleans-based activist was the founder of SEIU’s Local 100 chapter in Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas, which represented hotel workers. He also launched a social justice initiative in Arkansas that would become the mega-umbrella conglomerate of community organizers known today as ACORN. After 38 years, the association now claims more than 400,000 dues-paying members with more than 1,200 chapters across the country.

On his website, Rathke bills himself as a lifelong progressive who has been “dedicated to winning social justice, workers rights, and a democracy over the last 40 years, where the people shall rule.”
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Rathke recently became “chief organizer” of “ACORN International,” which now operates in “Canada, Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Dominican Republic, and India,” along with “emerging projects in Kenya and Ecuador and partnerships in Indonesia, Korea, and the Philippines.”

Like so many of his foot soldiers breaking into homes and registering cartoon characters to vote,
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ACORN’s founder isn’t telling the whole truth. His do-gooder image is a far cry from the ugly reality exposed not by right-wing radio or Republican Party operatives as might be expected, but by internal ACORN whistleblowers themselves, disgusted with the corrupt organization.

In June 2008, Rathke was forced to step down from the powerhouse association he founded. A month later, the
New York Times
(in a rare bit of investigative journalism against a left-wing sacred cow) exposed ACORN’s dirty laundry, prolonged cover-up, and complicated network of pass-through organizations. Reporter Stephanie Strom boiled it down:

Acorn chose to treat the embezzlement of nearly $1 million eight years ago as an internal matter and did not even notify its board. . . . A whistle-blower forced Acorn to disclose the embezzlement, which involved the brother of the organization’s founder, Wade Rathke.

The brother, Dale Rathke, embezzled nearly $1 million from Acorn and affiliated charitable organizations in 1999 and 2000, Acorn officials said, but a small group of executives decided to keep the information from almost all of the group’s board members and not to alert law enforcement.

Dale Rathke remained on Acorn’s payroll until a month ago, when disclosure of his theft by foundations and other donors forced the organization to dismiss him .
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Rathke admitted he suppressed disclosure of his brother’s massive theft—first discovered in 2000—because “word of the embezzlement would have put a ‘weapon’ into the hands of enemies of Acorn.” In other words: the protection of ACORN’s political viability came before protection of members’ dues (and taxpayers’ funds). Rathke’s supporters on ACORN’s board helped cover up the crime by carrying the amount his brother embezzled—$948,607.50—as a “loan” on the books of Citizens Consulting, Inc. CCI, the accounting and financial management arm of ACORN and its complex web of affiliates, is housed in the same building as the national ACORN headquarters in New Orleans. It’s also home to ACORN International, which Wade Rathke continues to head. ACORN brass cooked up a “restitution” plan to allow the Rathkes to pay back a measly $30,000 a year in exchange for secrecy about the deal. Dale Rathke kept his job and his $38,000 annual salary until the story leaked to donors and board members outside the Rathke circle.