The campaign that COI is most involved in, or at least featured on their main page, is the campaign to reform global remittance. Global remittance is the process by which ex patriates send money back to family in their home country. For instance, it’s been well documented that Mexico’s main economic source is actually money sent back home from the USA. According to Rathke, this is an industry that topped $300 billion, and far too many of its players practice predatory lending practices. For instance, Rathke has seen fees up to 20% of the amount to be wired. So, if someone were to send $1000 back home, they would be charged $200 to process this transaction. Rathke stressed that such fees were an “outlier” but fees of 5% are about the norm. In his view, this is far too much, and the poor are being taken advantage of by predatory lending practices in this area. Furthermore, with these rates, it also leads to a black market. That’s what’s happening. Often people send money home with all sorts of strangers because they’re promised that it will get there with no charge.

Furthermore, fees to countries in Africa are often significantly higher than to Mexico and other parts of the world. Rathke told me that he hasn’t seen any evidence that it actually costs Western Union any more to wire money to Africa than it does anywhere else. So, the fees should be the same. Rathke would like to “open a dialogue” with Western Union, Moneygram, as well as several of the largest multi national banks to speak about fees charged for remittance. In fact, Rathke believes that multi national banks like Citigroup could get involved in remittance and not only bring about much needed competition which would bring prices down, but also add another source of income for these banks.

For now, Rathke would merely like to sit at the negotiating table with representatives of Western Union et al. He told me that he didn’t have a percentage in mind. He was hoping to get an idea of how much it costs these organizations to process these transactions and then negotiate a “fair rate”. One individual I spoke with called Rathke a “master negotiator” and so that’s probably a place he’d be comfortable at.

I pointed out that major banks and wire transfer institutions like Western Union aren’t likely to sit down at the negotiating table with Wade Rathke just because he asked nicely. I also told him that I believed that he wouldn’t give up just because the other side wasn’t willing to negotiate when asked nicely. So, how far would he take his protests and how cut-throat would he be in dealing with these banks and transfer institutions? I asked if he was willing to picket outside of these places. Rathke laughed and he told me that he didn’t think that pickets and protests were “cut-throat” and that “if an institution is predatory in their remittance charges you bet we’ll let their customers know it”. Rathke told me that at this stage COI only wants to represent those folks looking to use remittance services and isn’t looking to be a vendor because among other reasons they don’t have the infrastructure for such a venture.

COI is also working on a campaign in India to raise the profile of the issue of Wal-Mart’s entry into India. In India, internal laws don’t allow for retailers from outside the country. So, that bars WalMart from entering the country. Still, Rathke says that it’s inevitable that WalMart will find its way into India in the next five to ten years. He said that in their society there are all sorts of unintended consequences with bringing WalMart in. Currently, retail in India is done mostly by street vendors and the equivalent of our mom and pop thrift stores. Having a big box top store come in and swallow up neighborhoods can create all sorts of adverse effects on such a society. As such, COI is campaigning to have the government in India study and plan for WalMart’s inevitable entry into their market. Rathke has a long history with Walmart. Several years ago, he campaigned for a living wage and health insurance for Walmart employees. When, in 2006, a Walmart employee was left for dead because they were very sick and without insurance, the publicity that Rathke created from this story caused Walmart to relent and begin to provide health insurance to some employees and they cut their generic prescription prices to $4.

The one impression I got of Rathke is his pleasant demeanor. If the pressure and stress of the controversy surrounding ACORN has gotten to him, he certainly didn’t express it outwardly. Several folks told me that to be a good organizer you have to have a pleasant demeanor. I next turned to some questions about ACORN itself and it was at this point that the interview, which was almost exclusively pleasant, became contentious. I asked him what he had learned from his experience at ACORN and how he would try to apply that to COI. He was coy as though he didn’t understand what I was asking though I believe he did. He told me the structure of ACORN is different than the structure of COI. ACORN, according to Rathke, was one corporation while COI was a federation. In that, COI is currently in seven different countries. Yet, each country is its own separate entity. Meanwhile, all of ACORN’s affiliates, according to Rathke, were all part of the same organization. Yet, I pointed out, Rathke was in control of the entire federation.

I said that a cynic would believe that the bank accounts of ACORN Dominican Republic and ACORN Canada (each individual country in COI still uses the ACORN name) would eventually be comingled. Rathke responded that international banking laws would never allow such things. I responded that there were all sorts US laws that were broken by ACORN. At this point, Rathke lost his pleasant demeanor. He told me that ACORN broke NO laws. In his 39 years at the helm, they were audited each and every year and passed each and every time. He told me that I was talking to Wade Rathke and not some right wing ideologue.

There are several points of interest in this exchange. First, if Rathke sits at the top of this “federation”, it’s still unclear to me how each is separate. Without knowing who controls each bank account, it’s still not clear that funds can’t be comingled. Second, and much more importantly, ACORN always claimed that affiliates were separate of each other. Here, Rathke told me what many that want ACORN reformed have suggested, if not accused. That’s that ACORN and its affiliates aren’t separate but all part of the same organization, ACORN itself. What Rathke told me about ACORN’s structure is exactly the same as what many critics of ACORN have accused the group of doing.

I also asked him about the firing of Beth Butler. Butler is Rathke’s common law wife and she was, until recently, the long time head of Louisiana’s branch of ACORN. Rathke thought that it was inexplicable that at this point of turmoil that the hierarchy would fire Butler. The move only added chaos at a time when the organization was already in turmoil. He couldn’t explain it, understand it, or in any way see how it helped ACORN. I asked him what he thought of Steve Bradbury taking over for Butler. The back story here is that Bradbury could be considered a protege of Rathke. He certainly taught Bradbury a lot and Rathke had befriended Bradbury and groomed him for years. By taking over for Butler, this could be viewed as a betrayal. I said none of this, and Rathke was diplomatic. He told me that he read in a newspaper that Bradbury said this move was temporary and Rathke was taking him at his word.

Finally, I asked Rathke about his legacy. Did he think about his legacy? “Mike, I’ve been doing this for forty years, of course I think about my legacy”. He believes his legacy still has several chapters left. In that way, he looks forward. At the same time, he told me that no one is a “bigger fan of ACORN” than Rathke and that he’s saddened to watch them disintegrate so badly. He certainly understood that this disintegration did no favors to his legacy. Several people told me that as much as Alinsky has become an adjective and a verb, that one day Rathke would be synonymous with a style of organizing. With no hint of modesty, Rathke agreed.

Epilogue:

I didn’t ask Wade Rathke about his brother’s embezzlement. When things became contentious, I cut it off and moved on. I did this for several reasons. First, I asked Wade Rathke if he had time to talk about his campaign about remittance. I could have blind sided him with all sorts of gotcha questions about his brother and other alleged ACORN misdeeds. I don’t think that Rathke would have made any stunning admissions to me and of course, that’s not what we agreed on. The week previous to the interview, I wrote about the firing of Beth Butler and I said that moving forward Wade Rathke is the story. That’s the case. What has happened, the embezzlement, the investigations, and the disintegration, is not the story. Wade Rathke is the story, and what he’s going to do going forward is the story. All the other things have been hyperanalyzed, and there’s nothing I could have added to the discussion.

Wade Rathke is trying to do in the world what he did in the US. That is to grow a community to serve the poor and middle class throughout the world. People from all sides of the philosophical and ideological aisle will fill in the blanks on that statement. Ultimately, that chapter has only begun. It is the story now, and that’s why I wanted the interview. What happened in the past isn’t nearly as interesting as what Rathke wants to do in the future.

What if the patient were a cop? Should they lose their badge?

What if the patient were a teacher? Should they lose their classroom?

What if the patient were an entire political movement? Should they lose their credibility and status as an authority on any and all subjects, at least those related to the weather?

At first glance, this 2007 report pulled from the internet archives of the Tides Foundation would appear to be making the claim described above; however, the cause is not so much driven by delusion as it is pathologically fraudulent.

The basic thrust of the publication (a conversation between the Tides Foundation’s Catherine Lerza and Redefining Progress’ Michel Gelobter) is that the effects of “global warming” are disproportionately felt by disadvantaged minorities.

[Catherine]Lerza: The impacts of global warming highlight social and racial inequalities around the world. It certainly affects poor communities differently. We saw that clearly in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Could you talk about these different impacts of climate change depending on geography, race, and class?

[Michel]Gelobter: Communities of color and low income communities in this country clearly feel the impact of climate change and have been feeling that impact for over 20 years.

My organization, Redefining Progress, has conducted a number of studies on Latinos and climate change and African-Americans and climate change. Different communities bear quite a different vulnerability to the risks of global warming. Six years ago, we already had figured out that the greatest victims of climate change were the lower-income communities and communities of color. You can see it in the disparity in heat deaths in St. Louis. You can see there’s an impact on agricultural communities and on border communities and indigenous communities, particularly in the Arctic.

We have to address issues of justice: people have a right to health and to a secure place to live. They have this right whether they’re black, or white, or whatever.

This excerpt clears up at least one major misconception: that the devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina was the result of nature mixed with systemic governmental failure at all levels.

The truth, according to this report, is that the devastation was the result of socioeconomic inequality.

The reader would be forgiven for concluding that rich white neighborhoods were spared from the evil clutches of Katrinika Globus Warmus, a storm fueled in part by racist urban flight.

Lerza: What you are describing is a profound overhaul of American economics and culture. In this sense, addressing the problem of climate change gives us an opportunity to build a lifestyle that’s more in accordance with our values, right?

Gelobter: Absolutely. I think that is true for all Americans.

What is the number one thing we can do for the environment? It’s to allow people to live together in diverse communities because the single biggest cause of environmental degradation in the Bay Area and other cities is literally people’s desire to flee to the suburb where everybody looks like them. It’s what keeps us from having jobs near mass transit hubs. And it’s what keeps us from having a mass transit system that is really effective.

These guys are advocating serious social engineering to address the evils of racist American “Global Warming.”

Gelobter: Thirty-five percent of all global warming that has happened is due to emissions from the U.S. alone. As global consciousness of this issue rises, it would be very smart for domestic consciousness to rise as well because there could be a lot of outrage globally when people come to understand the U.S.’s role in this issue.

The U.S. owes it to the world and to itself to leapfrog over Kyoto. Kyoto is not enough. Let’s go to the next level. I think that’s the only legitimate position. Kyoto is supposed to be done by 2012. It’s too late, and Kyoto doesn’t deal with the justice issues properly yet.

Going beyond Kyoto means, from a social justice and an economic perspective, we might need to lock up U.S. coal and even some of the oil. That means permanently tilting the playing field against fossil fuels use through economic signals, through regulatory signals, through the stopping of subsidies. We need to do this for two reasons: It’s a way to build a movement, and it sends the unambiguous economic signal needed to grow alternative ways of generating energy.

Any chance some of that “global warming” outrage will be organized by ACORN international? After all, ACORN is in the outrage-for-hire business.

The most nefarious element of this Progressive victocracy is its real motivation: money, money, and more money.

Gelobter: We can have a pollution charge on greenhouse gas pollution, or we can auction the right to emit greenhouse gas pollution the way we auction cell phone bandwidth. Redefining Progress research has shown that net revenues, nationally, from that kind of a charge or auction system could be as high as $300 billion dollars a year.

You need that money to help everybody transition. You can’t build new mass transit systems without large capital investments. So if we pay Exxon to stop polluting, they take that money and invest it in whatever they want. If Exxon pays us because they’re polluting, we take that money and we get ourselves off fossil fuels.

When you read this in the context of our previous post about ACORN’s potential tax payer funded windfall in New York State, (Hundreds of millions of dollars for environmental organizing and training related services) a clear pattern begins to emerge.

The environmental movement is about redistributing tax dollars for special interest projects, while fundamentally transforming our nation under the banner of environmental “justice.”

The original apparent delusion that evil global warming is out to get economically disadvantaged minorities only serves to fuel the charge of raaaaaacsim against anyone who would dare to oppose the economic redistribution.

Thank god Dr. Gelobter has never been in a position to influence the government!

Dr. Gelobter was the founding chair of the [EPA] National Environmental Justice Advisory Council Subcommittee on Air and Water and served there for six years.

Dr. Gelobter is also a tremendous fan President Obama. He was among a group of “Environmentalists for Obama” who threw their support behind then Senator Obama in his quest for the Democratic nomination. Obama was so proud he posted the letter on his campaign website.

In the video below, you can see Dr. Gelobter refer to the folks working with President Obama as the “dream team.”

Also in the video below (:35), Dr. Gelobter says, “I am hopeful that perhaps because of the economic crisis, and the new New Deal that’s coming to solve it, that the US will follow the necessary path of designing our way out of the criminal level of global warming pollution that we emit today.”

You can read more about that new New Deal here.

For even more context on Dr. Gelobter, watch the following video to hear him talk about his hope that the era of the individual is over!

Change you will have no choice but to believe in.

It has been well-documented that last year Rathke “left” ACORN U.S. to head over to ACORN International and export ACORN’s brand of organizing and tactics.  He has since changed the group’s name to Community Organizations International.

ACORN Community Organizing Model is not the type of document ACORN would wish to have on the Internet.  For ACORN, is tantamount to Eisenhower’s plan for D-Day being printed on the front page of the Washington Post.  Not a good thing for the ultra-secretive group.

Consider this frank section of “SETTING UP THE ORGANIZING DRIVE:”

2.  Contacts:  The whole process of making contacts is built on a pyramid theory.  Make one that leads to others.  The purpose of contacts is to gather information and resources, and to build power.  There are three types:  hot, warm, cold.  The hot contacts are people we have met before at some point in the organization’s history.  Check the biographical file in the state office.  Warm contacts are those we have not met but know something about in order to build an edge, i.e. we have an opener or a handle for the conversation – something they did, someone they know who we know, some reason to believe we can hit the core.  The cold contacts are those people we must meet for some reason, yet we have no lead to them.  The only edge there is simply an organizer’s skill in prying information and setting up his/her ego in order to loosen her/his tongue in person or on the phone.  It’s a skill to be perfected, if you’re greasy, you are in the hole. 

Groups such as Leaders and Organizers of Community Organizations in Asia clearly didn’t nor don’t understand the pressure and scrutiny ACORN has faced over the last several months.  But their foolishness or naivete is the ACORN’s researcher’s gain.

For whatever reason, the LOCOA site doesn’t create a direct link to the individual page.  If you wish to see it for yourself on the LOCOA site, go here, then click on Program in the menu bar.  Then, go to the second page of documents and click on ACORN Community Organizing Model.  Or, to save yourself time (not to mention if and when the document disappears from the website), you can visit ACORNcracked.com for a PDF.

“I’m Recognized to be a Fairly Dangerous Fellow Out There in the Community” – Wade Rathke

Let’s be honest, if Wade Rathke saw me walk into his book signing last Tuesday, he wouldn’t have been at his most candid.  I wanted insight into the man who created this racket that is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or is it the American Institute for Social Justice, or Citizens Consulting Inc?  I’m still not too sure.  I know it operates under 361 different affiliates in at least 43 states and the District of Columbia.

In his newly released book Citizen Wealth, he paints himself as a modern day Robin Hood, stealing from the evil faceless corporations to give to the poor.  But as he recounts these campaigns it becomes clear the corporations have faces, their CEOs, who he doesn’t hesitate to harass at home to demand financial concessions.  Wade’s stilted story almost makes him sound noble as he provides innocuous reasons why he would like to collect and store copies of people’s personal financial records and birth certificates or as he tries to rationalize why people would be well served by becoming dues paying ACORN members.

These past few months I believed Wade’s the blissfully ignorant captain whose been stripped of his command but still seems intent to go down with the ship.  He hasn’t “run” the organization since the very public revelation that his brother embezzled close to $1 million from ACORN and Wade went about covering it up.  He was negotiated out of the coveted “chief organizer” role that he had held for decades.  The ACORN Board allowed him to retain control of ACORN International, but when public pressure started building, he even went ahead and changed its name to COI – Community Organizations International.

Even in exile he denies that ACORN is a criminal enterprise and claims that allegations that federal and tax-exempt funds have been used for political purposes are a “complete fabrication.”

I had to hear him speak.  I had to see for myself if he really bought what he was selling.  But let’s be real.  I’m a twenty-eight year old Republican lawyer… and I look like one.  I wear Brooks Brothers suits, bold ties, and nine times out of ten there’s a pair of elephant cufflinks on my wrists.  If he saw me coming I doubted he would be as open in his proselytizing for community organizing.

I had to tone it down a notch.  No, I didn’t borrow James O’Keefe’s vintage chinchilla shoulder throw.  I just threw on jeans and a t-shirt, jumped in my SUV, and headed off to see ACORN’s Founding Father.

I arrived early and grabbed my seat in the middle of the room.  I expected a crowd.  Instead I was greeted by six reporters and ten supporters.

Wade had barely gotten started when that folksy “aw shucks” Wade Rathke persona took over:

“It’s all a new ride on the rodeo to me” when discussing how he is no longer accountable to ACORN members.

“The Single largest success in the last 20 years of the organized labor movement is home healthcare workers.”

On the Cloward-Piven model he cited his book which laments the fact that Americans who are eligible for government programs are not taking advantage of them.  He seemed wistful in his dreams of “maximum eligible participation.”

Then he hit his stride…

“I think it’s ridiculous that an organization like ACORN has to be involved in voter registration”

“We were raising up to $20 million to register voters before I left”

Throughout his remarks he was a steadfast defender of ACORN.

Maybe he truly believes in ACORN or whatever affiliates it’s doing business as.  Maybe he’s just doing right by the organization he built that did right by him.  It did provide him a steady living for decades, his embezzling brother too.  But they’re not the only members of the ACORN family.  ACORN also employed Rathke’s wife Beth Butler, his daughter Dine, and his son Chaco.  Who’d have expected nepotism in New Orleans?

Wade noted that “I’m a huge fan of ACORN, I pay my dues now.”

After hearing him speak I must admit, I was wrong about Wade.  He’s not the captain going down with his ship.  He’s more like the Iraqi Information Minister “Baghdad Bob” – in denial, steadfastly claiming victory even as American tanks rolled past.

He said so in his new book, Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families, in which he serves up some community organizing war stories, and offers his thoughts on the future of organizing. Rathke’s currently on a cross-country book tour.

ACORN founder Wade Rathke (to the right of the microphone) at an ACORN-SEIU rally.

Rathke, a pioneer of the so-called welfare rights movement that aims to get Americans on welfare, devotes an entire chapter of his book to what he calls “The ‘Maximum Eligible Participation’ Solution.” It is a strategy for orchestrated crisis that savvy leftist groups across America are likely to embrace. He writes:

“[I]t is hard to believe that we cannot assemble the troops to mount a campaign for maximum eligible participation that harvests the opportunities and dollars already available if we could achieve full utilization of existing programs.”

Rathke acknowledges his support for the Cloward-Piven Strategy, an approach to radical social and political change articulated by Marxist university professors Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven in a 1966 Nation article, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.” The two academics called for “a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls” in an effort to overwhelm the system. [Italics in original.]

The strategy helped to bankrupt New York City in 1975. Years later, the Big Apple’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, denounced the academic activists by name. “This wasn’t an accident,” Giuliani argued in a 1997 speech. “It wasn’t an atmospheric thing, it wasn’t supernatural. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare.”

In the Nation article, Cloward and Piven made it clear that they were irritated that plenty of Americans legally eligible to receive forcibly redistributed wealth hadn’t bothered to ask for handouts. “The discrepancy is not an accident stemming from bureaucratic inefficiency; rather, it is an integral feature of the welfare system which, if challenged, would precipitate a profound financial and political crisis.”

In his book Rathke hails “Cloward and Piven’s exciting call to arms.” He notes that the activist group they created and that he organized for in the late 1960s, the now-defunct National Welfare Rights Organization, caused “a flood tide from its work that allowed many boats to rise, including the level of participation in government assistance programs.”

In an interview with DailyKos blogger Robert Ellman, Rathke complains bitterly that Americans are not getting all the government benefits to which they are legally entitled. (The podcast is available here.)

With one question, Ellman unwittingly lays bare the anti-social, profoundly un-American entitlement mentality that so many on the far left possess. The blogger asks if the “lack of participation” in food stamps, Medicaid, and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), all of which many eligible people are not claiming, is “a failure of government, political will, or a culture that demonizes poor people?”

The unctuous Rathke, whom some have called a cult leader, doesn’t miss an opportunity to compliment his interviewer. “Once again you’ve hit the trifecta,” he says. “It’s really all three of those things.”

Rathke quotes approvingly from a New York Times op-ed by his fellow progressive poverty pimp, Barbara Ehrenreich, in which he says she does

a devastating job of looking at the fact that we’re still criminalizing poor people, requiring fingerprints in states like Florida and Texas and California. For even simple welfare applications and food stamp applications, we are going out of our way, and she quotes chapters and verse from various professors, to make it almost easier to do anything in the world other than get benefits that people are legally entitled to.

Incidentally, ACORN knows all about food stamps. Even though people on welfare shouldn’t be trying to buy homes, ACORN cajoled banks into accepting food stamps as income on mortgage applications and then bragged about it.

Returning to the interview, soon Rathke’s comments bring to mind the Will Rogers quip, “Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.” Laying out a strategy for orchestrated crisis for the Information Age, Rathke says:

If we just did the job that we needed to do to make sure everything that’s legally entitled to people actually finally gets to people we would make a huge difference in creating citizen wealth and family security. And there’s no reason not to do this. This is a highly technical age. Why we’re forcing everybody to fill out a million forms, come up with a million different pieces of paper when we could do almost all of it through computers, do it quickly, verify it, keep the records, you know, in PDFs or scanned documents or whatever. There’s a lot of people who know how to do this more than you and I, but this could be a huge breakthrough in eligibility.

Rathke asks, “Why not have computers in grocery stores and community centers — and they are in many libraries now — and in churches and synagogues so that people in working communities have easy access to the software to apply for these benefits.”

What Rathke doesn’t explain is that President Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress made it much easier a few months ago for those like him who want to overload the system in order to bring about its demise.

That’s because the spectacularly successful Clinton era welfare reforms that helped millions of Americans break free from crippling dependency on the public fisc were summarily executed in February. Provisions buried deep in the stimulus package signed by President Obama, who used to work for ACORN, offer new financial incentives to states to increase their welfare caseloads.

ACORN, whose national board fired Rathke a year ago for gross misconduct, won’t have any difficulty causing the next welfare crisis without him, assuming it isn’t shut down by authorities for racketeering or election fraud.

Meanwhile, Rathke isn’t content merely to screw up America.

Like a modern-day Karl Marx in exile, he is doing his best to spread the wealth all around the globe, spreading social justice and shakedown techniques.

After the humiliation of being fired for an eight-year cover-up of his brother Dale’s nearly $1 million embezzlement of ACORN funds, Rathke remains deeply involved with at least three of ACORN’s more than 100 affiliated nonprofits. (Just this past weekend America learned in a New York Post article by Ginger Adams Otis what Dale blew his ill-gotten gains on.)

He recently changed the name of ACORN’s international consultancy, ACORN International, to Community Organizations International. Rathke also remains chief organizer, or CEO, of the New Orleans-based Local 100 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), another ACORN affiliate he founded. He does not appear to have stepped down as president and director of Affiliated Media Foundation Movement (AM/FM), an ACORN affiliate that produces news segments for eight alternative radio stations.

Although Rathke has long drawn inspiration from Saul Alinsky’s legendary political strategy book, Rules for Radicals, he only believes in rules if they benefit him.

To this day he continues to defy the resolution approved on a vote of 29 to 14 by ACORN’s national board on June 20, 2008. It declared that Rathke “be terminated from all employment with ACORN and its affiliated organizations or corporations” and that he “be removed from all boards & any leadership roles with ACORN or its affiliated organizations or corporations.”

Alinsky, who taught the importance of flexibility, would be proud.

(This article is an updated version of an article that ran in the American Spectator in July of this year.)