At first glance, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) conference call of August 10th, 2009sounds innocent enough because it’s supposedly been organized by Michael Skolnik, political director for Russell Simmons and someone not officially associated with any government agency. Skolnik appears to be acting independently as a concerned citizen and to have taken it upon himself to gather together a group of artists and art organizations hoping to move them towards “national service.” And how nice of the White House, the federal government and the NEA to make the time to participate in the call and aid this group of American artists motivated to help their country and community.

But this is only how things appear.

All evidence points to the fact that the conference call was a ruse, a front for a White House using Skolnik as a kind of beard in order to put an innocent spin on their abuse of the NEA and two non-partisan volunteer organizations (United We Serve – an initiative overseen by The Corporation for National and Community Service – a federal agency, and the White House’ Office of Public Engagement).

The goal: To motivate a group of hand-picked pro-Obama artists (grant recipients or those wanting grants) to push the President’s flagging agenda, especially health care — and to funnel this promotion through the ACORN related- Serve.gov website.

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Documentation gathered by Big Hollywood’s Patrick Courrielche and the Washington Times, coupled with a newly revealed audio recording of the full conference call, points to eight troubling facts that put the full context of the call in a very disturbing light. (more…)

BigGovernment.com continues to wake-up America to Obama Administration relationships with ACORN and Big Labor.  BigGov’s  latest story highlights Presidential Advisor Valerie Jarrett’s crew member Buffy Wicks who is the former political director of forced union dues financed WakeupWalmart.com (Wakeup). In the conference call, Wicks highlighted the important role United We Serve (Serve.gov) has in President Obama’s Organizing America strategy. See Dana Loesch’s article about Serve.gov directing volunteers to ACORN.

The Obama campaign boastfully promoted Wick’s moniker, “Buffy the Wal-Mart Slayer” that highlights her community organizing experience with Wakeup’s efforts to increase costs for Wal-Mart and the prices for its customers.  However, the Obama White House press release tones down Wicks past position:

Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.  Wicks has a long history in grassroots organizing and civic engagement. Most recently she was the Director of the Renew America Together effort, the call to service issued by then President-elect Obama. She also served on the Obama for America campaign in a variety of roles, including California Field Director and Missouri State Director, and helped develop the national grassroots field strategy. She has also worked in the labor movement, fighting for better health care and wages for disenfranchised workers. She is originally from California and graduated with a double major in Political Science and History from the University of Washington.

(more…)

If you’ve ever wondered–and worried–about where government support of the arts leads, look no further than the full transcript of an August 10 telecon  between an official at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and a group of “independent artists from around the country.” The short version: It leads to the use of taxpayer-funded culture as a means of propagandizing for specific, partisan political aims. Which corrupts not just art but artists.

As Patrick Courrelieche, an L.A.-based arts organizer who participated in the call, reported at Big Hollywood, the people running the call, including the NEA’s director of communications Yosi Sergant  and members of the White House Office of Public Engagement and United We Serve, told the assembled crew of “thought leaders” that “we’re going to come at you with some specific asks here” (that’s a direct quote from Buffy Wicks of the Office of Public Engagement). 

Chief among the requests from Sergant (who was either “reassigned” from the agency or “reportedly resigned” after denying the full extent of his role in organizing the call) was “to pick something whether it’s health care, education, the environment, you know… [and] apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative communities’ utilities and bring them to the table.” Beyond the specific policy issues above, the call organizers stressed the ideologically loaded concept of “service” as the animating principle of the Obama administration and wanted the artists to do whatever they could to promote that. As Wicks put it, “We really view [our efforts] as an onramp to a lifetime of service. We really want service to be incorporated into people’s daily lives.”

Given that the NEA prides itself on being the single largest funding source for the arts in the country, such arm-twisting by agency officials, however masked in fulsome compliments to creators’ genius, is disturbing on its face. It clearly sets a political agenda for the very people who are likely to be applying for, well, NEA and other government grants. Does anyone think that the organizers were fishing around for projects that might complicate the public option for health care?

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**NEA conference call full audio and transcript here**

Should the National Endowment for the Arts encourage artists to create art on issues being vehemently debated nationally?

That is the question that I set out to discuss a little over three weeks ago when I wrote an article on Big Hollywood entitled The National Endowment for the Art of Persuasion?”

The question still requires debate but the facts do not.

The NEA and the White House did encourage a handpicked, pro-Obama arts group to address politically controversial issues under contentious national debate. That fact is irrefutable.

President Obama with the NEA’s Yosi Sergant

But some have claimed that the invite and passages, pulled from the conference call that inspired the article, were taken out of context. Context is what I intend to establish here.

On August 10th, the National Endowment for the Arts, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and the Corporation for National and Community Service hosted a conference call with a handpicked arts group. This arts group played a key role in Obama’s arts effort during his election campaign, as declared by the organizers of the call, and many on the call played a role in the now famous Obama Hope poster. (more…)

By overturning the rock and letting America witness the corruption at ACORN, Hannah and James have performed an incredibly valuable service. The rest of us now have an obligation to take the next steps. Shutting off the federal spigot to ACORN obviously is the immediate priority, but it is critically important that we also use this episode to explain that big government is inherently corrupt. The graft at ACORN was not an isolated example. The sleaze at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not exceptions. The pay-to-play scandals at the Appropriations Committees are not once-in-a-lifetime occurences.

As explained in this short video (alas, no exciting undercover revelations), the government’s bloated budget of nearly $4 trillion is a honeypot for special interests and their political lackeys. But it is not just a problem of wasteful spending. The massive regulatory apparatus creates similar opportunities for favor swapping and insider deals. And the tax code, with tens of thousands of pages of loopholes and special preferences, also is a rat’s nest of corruption.

Rep. Babette Josephs, Chair of PA House State Government Committee & ACORN Member

Despite receiving a “cease and desist” notice from the Department of State to stop soliciting contributions, Pennsylvania taxpayers have given ACORN over $200,000 in state grants since November 2007.  Yet none of the mainstream media in the Commonwealth is bothering to cover this issue.  Nor has it reported on recent efforts to defend this rogue organization.

Jeff Lord, writing in The American Spectator, noted how Rep. Steve Barrar’s efforts to investigate ACORN’s activities in Pennsylvania are being stymied by Rep. Babette Josephs—a self-identified member of ACORN.  Josephs is the Chair of the House State Government Committee—the committee where good government legislation goes to die.

Nate Benefield of the Commonwealth Foundation wrote about her blocking reform bills in May 2008, calling her the Cerberus of the Pennsylvania General Assembly.  Cerberus is the giant three-headed dog in Greek Mythology that guards the river Styx, allowing the dead to enter Hades, but preventing anyone—save a few legendary heroes—from exiting.  Josephs is that guard-dog that allows all types of substantive and good-government legislative proposals—like Barrar’s—but never again allows them to see the light of day.

Earlier this week, with the vote to de-fund ACORN in the US Senate and the Census severing ties with the organization, one would think such actions in Harrisburg would yield similar success.  Not so.  Barrar, in an effort to circumvent Cerberus, attempted to suspend House rules to amend a bill that would prevent taxpayer money from flowing to this nefarious group.  But House Democrats, holding a slim majority, stood shoulder to shoulder with Cerberus to thwart Barrar’s efforts.

Haven’t heard about this?  Unfortunately, neither have the people of Pennsylvania who continue to be forced to subsidize Babette Josephs’s organization.

Now, with a budget deal apparently and finally in place—Pennsylvania was the last state without a budget—maybe the media will finally get around to asking where all our money is going. 

On August 25th 2009, Big Hollywood’s Patrick Courrielche broke the story of a conference call he attended with other “rising artist and art community luminaries”:

On Thursday August 6th, I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to attend a conference call scheduled for Monday August 10th hosted by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve. The call would include “a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!”

The email invite came directly from Yosi Sergant, then-Director of Communications at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and it advised this hand-picked group that the call was about laying “a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”

Courrielche describes the call this way: (more…)

Everything you needed to know about the unorthodox roll out of the now-notorious ACORN sting videos was hidden in plain sight in my Sept. 7 column, “Katie Couric, Look in the Mirror.” ACORN was not the only target of those videos; so were Katie, Brian, Charlie and every other mainstream media pooh-bah.

They were not going to report this blockbuster unless they were forced to. And they were. What’s more, it ain’t over yet. Not every hint I dropped in that piece about what was to come has played itself out yet.Stay tuned.

When filmmaker and provocateur James O’Keefe came to my office to show me the video of him and his friend, Hannah Giles, going to the Baltimore offices of ACORN – the nation’s foremost “community organizers” – dressed as a pimp and a prostitute and asking for – and getting – help for various illegal activities, he sought my advice. In the past, Mr. O’Keefe created brilliant social satire that rocked his college campus and even made its way on to the talk-radio and cable-news shows, but the magnitude of his latest adventure had the potential to rock the political establishment.

I was awed by Mr. O’Keefe’s guts and amazed by the footage, but explained that the mainstream media would try to kill this important and illuminating expose about a corrupt and criminal political racket, and that the well-funded political left would go into “war room” mode, with 25-year-old Mr. O’Keefe and 20-year-old cohort Miss Giles in the cross hairs. I felt I had a moral obligation to protect these young muckrakers from the left and from the media, and to devise a strategy that would force the media’s hand. (more…)

If rightwing operatives succeed in bringing down the community group, Democrats and minorities will have lost a valuable ally

By Brad Friedman

Communism is dead. Al-Qaida isn’t as scary as it used to be. But an American rightwing without a bogeyman to fear can’t long survive. Enter Acorn – the Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now.

Finally, something for the Republican party to use to stoke fear among its constituency. Acorn is perfect. The nationwide community group is full of scary black and poor people – who tend to support the Democrats. And, most convenient of all, it registers millions of them, legally, to vote in US elections. Spooky.

Stop Acorn, and you can stop the rise of citizen democracy altogether – you know, “government of the people, by the people, for the people“, as we used to like to say here in the US. Or so the Republicans have convinced themselves… (more…)

***Full interview below***

Today Chris Wallace interviewed ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis and noted ACORN critic Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA).

Politico reports on the interview here:

Issa to ACORN: Will you come before Congress?

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) challenged ACORN chief executive Bertha Lewis on Sunday to come before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to explain how her group used its federal funding, which Congress voted to cut off last week.

“Will you come before Chairman Towns … and give the kind of disclosure to where the Government Oversight and Reform Committee could know that you are doing work with firewalls, as you say, so the American people know that their dollars don’t end up doing political activities prohibited by law?” Issa, the committee’s ranking Republican, asked on “Fox News Sunday.”

Lewis would not commit specifically to go before the committee to explain how they group separates its charity, political and federal funding. (more…)

Today, the New York Post rolls out an almost 2,000 words on the history, and troubles, of ACORN. It is a great place to start cracking open the ACORN nut:

Just how nutty is ACORN?

Very, say longtime watchers of the extreme leftwing group that sprouted out of a radical 60s anti-government movement.

For decades ACORN has presented itself as a grassroots network dedicated to improving the lives of the poor.

But there’s more to ACORN than its do-gooder veneer.

Just ask the banks, corporations and politicians who’ve been the target of ACORN’s shameless shenanigans over the past 40 years.

Here’s how the tiny seed of 1960s radicalism blossomed into a well-funded, national organization with political connections reaching all the way to the White House:

Pour a cup of coffee, sit back and read the whole thing here.

From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama says there should be an investigation into the hidden-camera video involving employees at the activist group ACORN and a couple posing as a prostitute and her pimp. The two ACORN workers are seen apparently advising the couple to lie about her profession and launder her earnings to get housing aid.

The video is only the latest problem for the group, which had nearly $1 million embezzled by its founder’s brother and has been accused of voter registration fraud. The House and Senate voted last week to deny federal funds to ACORN.

Obama told ABC’s “This Week” in an interview broadcast Sunday that what he saw on the video “was certainly inappropriate and deserves to be investigated.” But the president did not say who should investigate. And he said it is not a major national issue he pays much attention to.

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You’d think for $53 million in federal funds — not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars from left-wing foundations — over the years, ACORN would be able to pay its own employees well. It turns out that while their employees have been caught treating taxpayer funds like trash, their own bosses have the same opinion of them.

The Washington Post, in a post mid-mortem of ACORN, took a moment to look at the group’s record as an employer and highlighted the group’s 2003 incident of busting a union drive by its own employees:

According to an NLRB case accusing ACORN of unfair labor practices, “field organizers were expected to work long hours each week — 54 hours — and were paid at a salary of $16,000 annually until January 2001, when the salary was raised to $18,000.”

The NLRB documented a high turnover rate for ACORN employees: In 2000, far less than 10 percent of Dallas office employees stayed in the job for six months, and “most did not even complete their training period, but quit within a few days or weeks of being hired,” according to the NLRB.

During the Clinton administration, the Labor Department accused ACORN arm Citizens Consulting Inc. of failing to pay workers overtime.

But wait, there’s more! There was ACORN suing to exempt itself from the minimum wage in California and repeated stories of it failing to pay its employees on time (see example):

It’s most ironic that ACORN has spent decades creating unions and telling everyone else how much to pay in “living wages” only to act as some sort of caricature of a bad boss from a 1920’s sweatshop.

Somebody, unionize ACORN! They deserve the union they get.

In a front page story today, the Washington Post digs into many of the troubles and scandals that have plagued ACORN in recent years. Here’s a key graph on the last ‘independent review’ ACORN conducted:

In a June 2008 report to ACORN, Washington lawyer Elizabeth Kingsley, who conducted an independent review of the group’s finances, expressed concern that inadequate documentation of money transfers between ACORN and an allied organization, Project Vote, would make it difficult for either group to respond effectively to questions about whether tax-deductible charitable contributions were used for political purposes. She also noted conflicts created when decision-makers at the tax-exempt entity had roles in political activities carried out by other groups.

Read the whole story here. Check out this for Big Government’s take on ACORN’s latest ‘independent review’ proposal.

Exclusive story here.

Listen to the full unedited audio here:

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San_Diego_2 –

Exclusive story here.

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Full Transcript: ACORN Prostitution Scandal, San Diego –

From an article that will appear in tomorrow’s Chicago Tribune:

ACORN is in very deep, very public trouble, and the U.S. attorney general should appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate. What we know so far is due entirely to two amateur reporters, James E. O’Keefe III, 25, and Hannah Giles, 20, who managed to videotape a web of corrupt practices in ACORN offices. Dressed as a pimp and prostitute, O’Keefe and Giles walked into ACORN offices from New York to California and simply asked for business advice. ACORN officials were happy to provide it and were secretly recorded explaining exactly how to evade the law and scam the government. The tapes were riveting. Fox News rolled out a new one each night for a week, creating a firestorm of outrage and a burgeoning political scandal.

ACORN employees, without raising an eyebrow, much less calling the police, explained how the young sex workers could label themselves “performance artists,” underreport their income, evade taxes, fraudulently buy a house to ply their trade, and, worst of all, import underage girls from Central America to use as child prostitutes. One ACORN employee helpfully explained that the teenagers would even be tax-deductible since they would be “dependents,” living in the pimp’s house. Some states, led by California, are saying they will investigate. But this is a national scandal and there ought to be a full-scale national inquiry. To ensure impartiality — and the appearance of impartiality — political appointees at the U.S. Department of Justice should recuse themselves. This case demands an independent federal prosecutor.

Read the full article here.

Journalists need to ask themselves, how did this happen? How could they miss the corruption at ACORN? President Obama was once an ACORN lawyer, so the group is certainly significant enough to warrant media scrutiny. Then how did all the seasoned professionals get scooped by two students–James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles–one of whom isn’t old enough to legally drink?

ACORN’s many problems have been well known for quite a while, at least to anyone venturing beyond network newscasts and liberal blogs. As an organization, ACORN doesn’t just limit itself to churning out forged voter registrations. It’s a full-blown racketeering enterprise worthy of The Sopranos, and it finances its operations with the help of taxpayer money.

So how could the major media fail to hold ACORN to account all these years?

I have my pet theory.

Political correctness has been slowly rotting the establishment media to its core, to the point where few professional journalists would dare launch a serious investigation into the exalted Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now. Why? Simple: according to the tenets of political correctness, the racial makeup of the communities being “organized” automatically confers the presumption of moral superiority upon ACORN. So all those nasty rumors about ACORN must be no more than lies spread by racist propagandists.

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From Fox News:

The House and Senate each passed bills this week that would strip ACORN of taxpayer money, but it may not be so easy to halt federal funding for the scandal-plagued community organizing group.

The measures to de-fund ACORN won the support of both Republicans and Democrats, but they were passed as amendments to separate, unrelated bills — setting up a potentially drawn-out process to reconcile the differences in the legislation.

But since the anti-ACORN measure has bipartisan support, why not simplify?

That’s the idea behind Republican House Minority Leader Boehner’s push for a stand-alone vote to ensure that taxpayer dollars will no longer be used to fund the organization, which has been reeling from a scandal involving undercover videos that purport to show ACORN workers advising a couple posing as a pimp and prostitute on how to skirt the law.

Read the whole story here.