The organized crime syndicate, which used to employ President Obama, may be fined as little as $1,000. Because ACORN, the shell corporation that ran the corrupt ACORN network, is in bankruptcy, it may end up paying nothing at all.

ACORN was convicted of felony-level unlawful compensation for registration of voters. With the full knowledge of upper management, ACORN illegally offered cash bonuses to its voter registration canvassers in a scheme called “Blackjack.” Canvassers received extra money if they hit the magic number of 21 registrations in a day.

Senior ACORN executives Amy Adele Busefink and Christopher Howell Edwards were also convicted for their roles in the scheme. ACORN cared so little about the conspiracy that its voter fraud division, Project Vote, put Busefink in charge of the group’s national get-out-the-vote drive in 2010 while she was under indictment in Nevada.

Mickey Mouse, Mary Poppins, and various celebrities living and dead have been registered to vote over and over again precisely because ACORN has been allowed to get away with polluting the nation’s voter rolls for so long.

As I report in my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers at least 54 ACORN employees and individuals associated with ACORN have been convicted of voter fraud. Voter fraud is a blanket term coined by lawyers. It refers to fraudulent voting, identify fraud, perjury, voter registration fraud, forgery, and a variety of crimes related to the electoral process.

Significantly, this is the first time ACORN itself, as opposed to its individual employees, has been convicted of a crime.

But this is not the first time that ACORN has found itself in legal hot water.

Judicial Watch just uncovered massive voter fraud by ACORN in Colorado and ACORN settled a racketeering lawsuit in Ohio out of court last year and agreed to leave the state. In the settlement with the Buckeye Institute’s 1851 Center for Constitutional Law, ACORN agreed to “cease all Ohio activity” and surrender all its state business licenses.

ACORN’s crimes committed in various states could give rise to a federal racketeering prosecution. Such action seems unlikely given that ACORN operatives now run the White House (and the Democratic National Committee).

All of ACORN’s crimes are exhaustively documented in Subversion Inc.

Despite the bankruptcy filing, ACORN continues to operate. Project Vote and ACORN’s mortgage bubble generator ACORN Housing (renamed Affordable Housing Centers of America) are still is business. ACORN’s state chapters now operate under assumed names such as Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, New York Communities for Change, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, and Action United (Pennsylvania).

ACORN officials openly acknowledge the network is restructuring and soon will re-emerge to help reelect President Obama in 2012.

* * * * *

America needs to know that ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer. These radical leftists who use the brutal, in-your-face, pressure tactics of Saul Alinsky want to destroy America as we know it and will use any means to do it.

Buy my book Subversion Inc. at Amazon and in Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million bookstores. Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.

I reported on the emergence of the “new” ACORN groups in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. Although ACORN filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy last Election Day, its state chapters have been quietly restructuring under assumed names. Mortgage bubble generator ACORN Housing changed its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America while ACORN’s vote fraud factory Project Vote continues operating out of ACORN’s old Washington, D.C. office.

The subversive plan hatched by Stephen Lerner, an international board member of the radical Service Employees International Union, aims to destroy the nation’s financial system. Lerner is influential in leftist organizing circles and has reportedly visited the Obama White House at least four times.

After Greeks rioted over austerity measures, the stock market fell, Lerner observed. “The folks that control this country care about one thing: how the stock market does; how the bond market does; and what their bonus is.”

Lerner said a strategy was needed that addressed the following questions: “How do we bring down the stock market, how do we bring down their bonuses, how do we interfere with their ability … to be rich?” It is important “to politically isolate them, economically isolate them and disrupt them,” he said.

JPMorgan Chase is the first target of SEIU and its longtime allies at ACORN. Other Saul Alinsky-inspired pressure groups nationwide are participating in the effort, including the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), National People’s Action (NPA), PICO National Network, and Alliance for a Just Society, according to ChaseHomeFinanceSux.com.

Amusingly, the latter website highlights an article called “Jamie Dimon is Running ‘A House of Ill Repute.’” As Big Government readers are aware, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles captured ACORN workers on undercover videos giving helpful advice on establishing a house of ill repute, an old-fashioned expression for a brothel.

Earlier this year Lerner said that after consulting his allies he decided that JPMorgan Chase would be “a really good company to hate.” If leftists really believe capitalism is in a “transformative stage,” they “need to confront this in a serious way and develop a real ability to put a boot in the wheel.” Said Lerner

… we really are trying to disrupt and create uncertainty for capital, for how corporations operate … there are actually extraordinary things that we could do right now that would start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement.

Echoing the infamous Cloward-Piven Strategy of orchestrated crisis, Lerner said a nationwide mortgage strike would be a nightmare for Wall Street. He noted that 25 percent of homeowners now own a home worth less than they paid for it. Of those “under water” homeowners, 10 percent “are now in strategic default, meaning they’re refusing to pay but they’re staying in their homes.” The homeowners, who figured out it might take lenders a year to foreclose on their mortgages and evict them, should be urged to stay put. “If you could double that number, you would … put banks on the edge of insolvency again.”

Lerner said banks that don’t pay their “fair share” in taxes or refuse to slash interest rates and partially forgive mortgage principal are being targeted. He also called for state and local governments to stop doing business with banks that refuse to become de facto relief agencies by redistributing their own wealth to homeowners who made dumb investment decisions.

ACORN’s newly renamed chapters in New York (New York Communities for Change), California (Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment), Missouri (Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment), and Washington state (Organization United for Reform) make no secret about their participation in the scheme.

NYCC claims JPMorgan Chase’s foreclosures policies are unfair. The group takes credit for the town of Hempstead in Nassau County, N.Y., “closing the Chase Account and moving $12.5 millions in tax payer dollars out of the pockets of the greedy Wall Street Bankers who caused the finanical [sic] crisis!” NYCC is pressuring other municipalities in the state, including Albany, to do the same. The group claims “NYCC members in almost 40 cities, villages and counties have emailed their elected officials to demand the local government stop doing business with Chase.”

Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) boasts that 22 activists were arrested protesting foreclosures outside a Chase office in Los Angeles. “These banks are terrorists,” said Peggy Mears. “They terrorize us by threatening to take our homes.”

In South L.A., ACCE and SEIU held a mock trial outside a Chase office. ACCE organizer Evelyn Gutierrez said her group targeted Chase because it lent money to poor people, which is exactly what ACORN pressured it to do in recent decades.

ACCE wants the bank to “forgive” all the principal borrowed, said JPMorgan Chase spokesman Gary Kischner. “We’ve done over one million loan modifications and we’ve had outreach events like the one we did at the Convention Center in January.”

Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE), led by veteran ACORN organizer Jeff Ordower, jumped on the anti-Chase bandwagon last year, leading an assault on a Chase office in the suburbs of St. Louis.

Organization United for Reform (OUR) led a protest outside the Chase branch in Marysville, Washington. OUR demanded that Chase give part of a $1.4 billion tax refund to the local school district. Chase spokesman Darcy Donahoe-Wilmot pointed out that the bank already gave more than $11.4 million to nonprofits in the state last year.

It should be noted that SEIU’s Lerner isn’t the first to advocate using in-your-face tactics.  George Goehl explained how to murder the American Dream at the “America’s Future Now!” conference last summer in Washington, D.C.

“The banking crisis is the next big thing,” said Goehl, executive director of Chicago-based National People’s Action. “The banking crisis is the way to build a big economic justice movement in this country.”

The crisis presents “a once in a lifetime opportunity as progressives to engage millions of Americans in a big conversation around serious economic restructuring,” he said, “not around eking out some victories around the margins, not about making life a little less worse for people, but about big time transformative change.”

“People are ready to move to the streets, some because they’re angry, some because they want justice right now, and some because they’re tired of hearing about the tea party coming out.”

SEIU and ACORN heeded Goehl’s call.

* * * * *

America needs to know that ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer. These radical leftists who use the brutal, in-your-face, pressure tactics of Saul Alinsky want to destroy America as we know it and will use any means to do it.

Buy the book at Amazon and in Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million bookstores. Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.

The massive conglomerate ACORN Housing Corp. and its subsidiaries owe an eye-popping $162,813 in back taxes, according to the Nexis public records database.

The money is owed to the IRS, California, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, the city of Philadelphia, and the California counties of Fresno and Santa Clara. (The 106 tax liens are listed at the bottom of this article.)

Like a con artist trying to escape his past, ACORN Housing legally changed its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America Inc. (AHCOA).

ACORN Housing grew out of crime: trespassing and breaking and entering. It emerged from a 1982 squatting campaign in which ACORN built a squatters’ tent city behind the White House. Rampaging ACORN activists routinely break in and illegally occupy property already owned by others – and your tax dollars subsidize this criminal activity, as I write in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

ACORN Housing also helped to inflate the mortgage bubble. It bragged in a 1999 pamphlet that it had strong-armed banks into accepting food stamps and welfare as income on home loan applications.

Even now as America struggles with grave financial problems, the “new” ACORN Housing is going all out to get its hands on your hard-earned money.

AHCOA and its subsidiaries now have 32 “DUNS” numbers that have been officially registered. DUNS stands for Data Universal Numbering System.

Since 2003 the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has required applicants to obtain DUNS numbers in order to seek federal grants, so without them ACORN can’t feed at the public trough.

Posing as a new tax-exempt organization, ACORN Housing in San Antonio, Texas will receive an undisclosed percentage of a $619,696 federal grant. The subgrant comes from the federal National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling (NFMC) program.

The subgrant will probably be a fraction of the $6,184,168 in government grants ACORN Housing acknowledges receiving in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2010. (The $6,184,168 figure appears at page 9 of the group’s most recent publicly available tax return.)

Tax dollars given to ACORN Housing apparently don’t stay in ACORN Housing’s bank accounts for very long. Since 1997, ACORN Housing has shelled out more than $5.1 million in fees or grants to other entities in the ACORN network.

In 2008 alone, over 67 percent of gift and grants to ACORN Housing came from the federal government (and Bank of America). According to its tax returns, ACORN Housing gave $4,057,174 to the ACORN affiliate known as the American Institute for Social Justice, which has trained generations of Saul Alinsky-inspired organizers in the antisocial art of political agitation.

Investigators got wise to ACORN’s Enron-style accounting years ago. According to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee investigators, the group participates in a “shell-game of corporate financing that enables ACORN to commingle funds and potentially divert federal monies into partisan activities in violation of federal law.”

Meanwhile, it turns out that the $461,086 grant to AHCOA I reported on Monday was rescinded by President Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

This gets complicated, so bear with me.

After the article was published here at Big Government, HUD spokesman Jereon M. Brown contacted me by email. Brown acknowledged that the government’s USAspending.gov database referred to the money but said that a subsequent entry indicated that the award was canceled. “This amount was de-obligated and recovered,” he said. (The money was an unexpended portion of a block of funds from fiscal 2005, as detailed in the Federal Register.)

Through a quirk in the way the government reports on grants, even when a grant is withdrawn it is first reported in the database. After that, the cancellation of the grant is then reported in the same database. A separate item in the USAspending.gov database shows the rescission, Brown noted. The database “tracks dollars granted and it also tracks money recouped to provide an accurate snapshot to taxpayers,” he said.

This would appear to mean that in January when the Obama administration disallowed the $461,086 grant, it chose to obey the congressional ban on funding ACORN. That ban applies to monies appropriated in fiscal 2010 and previous fiscal years.

But just two months later, the Obama administration ignored the law when it provided a $79,819 grant to AHCOA. That grant came out of fiscal 2010 appropriations.

So in January funding AHCOA was a no-no, but March arrives and voila! – magically an Obama check gets cut.

What changed between January and March?

(Buy the book at Amazon. Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.)

TABLE OF TAX LIENS PENDING AGAINST ACORN HOUSING (a.k.a. AFFORDABLE HOUSING CENTERS OF AMERICA) AND ITS SUBSIDIARIES

Click on the chart below to enlarge it.

AHC = ACORN Housing Corp.

Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe III, the independent filmmakers behind the series of videos which swept the nation in 2009 and exposed internal corruption and illegality within ACORN Housing Corporation, were sued today in federal court in Philadelphia by an ACORN employee featured in one of the pair’s films.

The plaintiff is Katherine Conway-Russell, a Philadelphia resident who has worked for ACORN since March 2008 as an office director.  It was Conway-Russell who met with Giles and O’Keefe, posing as a prostitute and pimp as they had in ACORN offices nationwide during other installments of the undercover video series, for a private interview in her office at ACORN’s facility in Philadelphia on July 24, 2009.  This is the first such suit filed against the filmmakers by an individual ACORN employee.

The complaint, filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, claims that the Giles and O’Keefe “purportedly sought information regarding housing and mortgage opportunities in Philadelphia, but were in reality imposters who deliberately and surreptitiously created video and audio recordings in an attempt to discredit plaintiff Conway-Russell and ACORN Housing Corporation,” and that they subsequently “disseminated the illegally obtained recordings in a manner calculated to harm and injure” Katherine Conway-Russell.

Conway-Russell alleges that the actions of Giles and O’Keefe ran afoul of Pennsylvania Law and, indeed, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania all parties to a conversation must be aware of and consent to any recording.  According to 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 5703, it is a felony of the third degree to intentionally intercept, endeavor to intercept, or get any other person to intercept any wire, electronic, or oral communication without the consent of all the parties.

Read the whole article here.

It is understandable why Wall Street would be concerned about Dubai.  Why would they be concerned about ACORN?  On October 24, 2009, Biggovernment.com revealed that the San Diego office of ACORN dumped thousands of documents into a dumpster in advance of an investigation into the organizations activities by California Attorney General Jerry Brown.  I retrieved the documents from a shared public dumpster located behind the local ACORN office.  The documents that were retrieved filled the back of my Suburban.  Much of what was retrieved was truly trash, items such as banana peels, coffee grounds and marketing materials. After sorting through the documents, though, the 20,000 documents that were retained included sensitive personal information, financial records and documents outlining the internal and political workings of ACORN.  One of the documents obtained by Biggovernment.com shows that ACORN had business relationships with 28 major financial institutions for the purpose of assisting homeowners whose mortgages were in foreclosure.

ACORN – Citibank Flyer _Redacted_ –

Citigroup was one of the 28 financial institutions with which ACORN had a business relationship.  ACORN operated a Citi Outreach program where employees of ACORN were provided personal information for Citigroup’s customers and would make contact with borrowers who fell behind on their mortgage payments.  The objective of the program was to get homeowners to contact ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC).  Testimony provided to members of two congressional committees, the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee and the House Judiciary Committee, revealed that ACORN used the Citi Outreach program, as well as a program operated on behalf of Bank of America, as a membership recruiting tool where homeowners where expected to pay monthly membership dues to ACORN prior to receiving assistance.  Testimony provided by Anita MonCrief, a former ACORN employee turned whistle-blower, sated that ACORN had quotas for membership recruitment.  Documents provided to Biggovernment.com show that regardless of whether the homeowner was assisted or not, ACORN was paid by Citigroup as long as a current phone number was obtained.  The document also shows that ACORN employees were well aware of the need to keep these documents and records private due to state and federal privacy laws.  The document reads, “People on this list have their privacy protected.  Keep the lists private.”

ACORN – Citibank Outreach _Redacted_ –

The reason Wall Street lawyers and board rooms are concerned about ACORN beyond the current political and public relations drawbacks, ACORN’s actions of throwing sensitive private information into a public dumpster containing bank customer records begs the question, is a class action lawsuit in the offing?  One document obtained by Biggovernment.com shows Citibank customers names, addresses and mortgage loan numbers were illegally disclosed, not to mention the very fact that these individuals are on this list reveals their credit worthiness since they are in a default status with regards to paying their mortgage loans.

ACORN – Citibank Customer _Redacted_ –

Wall Street certainly has enough to worry about with a weak U.S. economy and uncertainty in global financial markets.  But thanks to ACORN, there is now more to worry about.  Citibank’s cavalier treatment of its customers sensitive, personal and financial information is potentially a serious breach of state and federal law. As the depth of the San Diego ACORN office data breach becomes more clear, Citigroup and possibly more banks, will have to prepare for the inevitable onslaught of low-income homeowners lining up to take advantage of what is truly to be a cash bonanza for the poor.  Be assured that there will be many law firms willing to help “spread the wealth” to these economically disadvantaged individuals whose personal information was treated with careless disregard.