If you read between the lines, it also seems to mean Citigroup agrees the panel is a sham.

Eve, senior vice president of Global Consumer Group, Community Relations, at Citigroup, quit after the National Legal and Policy Center pressed Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit to cut ties with ACORN.

In a letter to NLPC president Peter Flaherty, Citigroup announced Eve’s resignation from the panel.

“We too are deeply concerned about the recent media reports regarding ACORN and, because of those reports, have suspended our charitable financial support and program relationships with ACORN, and we are awaiting the results of the independent audit of ACORN activities now underway,” wrote Natalie Abatemarco, Citigroup’s vice president, Global Community Relations.

“On a related topic, please be advised that Eric Eve has resigned his position on the ACORN Advisory Council,” she added.

Citigroup is a Big Government lovers’ bank that funds just about every trendy left-wing cause in America.

Long before it started drowning in red ink, the poster child for so-called corporate social responsibility was a longtime donor to left-wing pressure groups such as Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s Nature Conservancy. In tax year 2003, Citigroup’s foundation gave 20 times more money to groups on the left than to groups on the right, according to Capital Research Center’s 2006 study of Fortune 100 foundation giving. (Foundation Watch, August 2006.)

Citigroup’s foundation has given a staggering $1.4 million to the alarmist World Resources Institute, as well as $509,000 to ACORN in recent years. The ACORN funding included a $500,000 grant to ACORN’s American Institute for Social Justice, which offers Saul Alinsky-style training in community organizing. Other donations to liberal groups include the Aspen Institute ($762,500), Rainbow/PUSH ($750,000), Nature Conservancy ($380,000), Rainforest Alliance ($200,000), and the Council on Foreign Relations ($50,000).

For her part, former ACORN national board member Marcel Reid never believed the council would accomplish anything. Reid and board member Karen Inman were expelled from ACORN by chief organizer Bertha Lewis for asking too many questions about the $1 million embezzlement perpetrated by ACORN founder Wade Rathke’s brother and then covered up for eight years.

When Reid, who is now a member of a reform group called ACORN 8, first heard of the panel, she told me this:

As former members of the Interim Management Committee elected by the national board of ACORN, we say that all of the things that this so-called independent panel is going to examine are things that we tried to accomplish. We called for all of these things –an audit, examination of the books, restructuring of the organization— all of this was already demanded by us.

And because we were trying to exercise due diligence as duly constituted directors of ACORN, we were relieved from our positions, forced out by the board under Bertha Lewis’s direction.

We have no idea how an independent, thorough audit of ACORN can be conducted by these people who were not selected by ACORN’s national board but were put in place by the same senior staff who conspired with Wade Rathke to cover up his brother’s embezzlement for eight years and who subsequently silenced any voice that called for truth, transparency and accountability.

Meanwhile, the remaining members of the council are ACORN allies and funders.

Former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger is leading the investigation. He’s a former president of the left-leaning group Common Cause.

The other members are

* John Podesta, President and CEO, Center for American Progress

* Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Board Member, RFK Foundation, former MD Lt. Governor

* Andrew Stern, International President, Service Employees International Union

* Henry Cisneros, Executive Chairman, Cityview (and a former HUD secretary)

* John Banks, Vice President of Government Relations, Con Ed

* Harvey Hirschfeld, President, Lawcash

*Dave Beckwith, Executive Director, Needmor Fund

Podesta helped manage Obama’s presidential transition team and heads the aggressively left-wing Center for American Progress. The center is heavily funded by George Soros and the subprime mortgage hucksters Herb and Marion Sandler.

Podesta has always been there for ACORN in its time of need. When ACORN got hit with a new wave of election fraud-related charges in May, the Center’s “Progress Action Fund” invited liberal and radical groups – including Harshbarger’s Common Cause – to a meeting in Washington, D.C., to plan how to use rhetorical misdirection to take the focus off ACORN’s increasingly well publicized corruption.

Andy Stern of SEIU is a longtime crusader for something called “social justice.” Social justice is when you have more toys than your friends, so your friends hit you over the head and take some of your toys away. That way everyone is equal. That’s social justice.

SEIU is intimately connected to ACORN but since the undercover sting videos surfaced showing ACORN employees giving advice on how to break the law, it’s trying to distance itself from the group.

Good luck with that, SEIU.

Since it’s a fairy tale, let me tell the story the fairy tale way:

Once upon a time there was a group called the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). It was run, and continues to be run today, by very bad people who do very bad things while they pretend to make America a better place.

They get very upset when people point out the bad things they do. They always lie about those things and call those people who speak against them nasty names like “racist” so those people will get scared and run away. Often it works.

They carry out voter registration drives strictly with a view to meeting predetermined quotas. They don’t give a farthing’s cuss if their canvassers register Mickey Mouse or the dead to vote; in fact, they encourage it. As long as the big fat checks keep coming in from billionaire leftist George Soros and Herb and Marion Sandler everything is OK in their eyes.

They always throw temper tantrums. They blackmail corporations and hold sit-ins at banks until they get their way. They take over forums and congressional hearings by force. When the police get involved they say that they are the real victims: Why are you arresting us? That’s not fair! They pretend to want to help the poor and then throw them overboard by taking massive “grants” from wealthy real estate developers.

Years ago Wade Rathke and his brother Dale Rathke did terrible things that were far worse than all the other things they’d done. Dale, who worked for ACORN, stole close to $1 million. Big brother Wade covered up the whole thing and the senior management at ACORN helped him.

Bertha Lewis, a lady who is now ACORN’s chief organizer, helped the Rathkes cover up Dale’s theft, but she was only one of the management people who helped out. Others helped their boss too.

When Dale’s embezzlement was discovered last year, Wade was forced out of ACORN by ACORN’s national board. It told Wade to stop affiliating himself with ACORN but he didn’t listen. He’s still chief organizer of ACORN affiliate SEIU Local 100 in New Orleans and he’s still trying to bring community organizing to far away places like India and Kenya. Maybe he’ll help President Obama’s half-brother, George Hussein Onyango Obama who lives near Nairobi. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? George is very poor.

Anyway, back when Wade was kicked out of ACORN the group’s national board appointed three board members to investigate the bad things that Wade and Dale did. Together the three people were called the Internal Management Committee (IMC). One of them is a very smart lady named Marcel Reid. Marcel’s father wanted a boy so he gave her that name. She likes her name even though it is a boy’s name.

Marcel started asking questions about the embezzlement, which is what the board told her to do. But when she asked to look at documents related to the embezzlement, management said no. She tried and tried and tried but they still said no. They got very upset with Marcel. Eventually they threw her out of ACORN even though she didn’t anything wrong. They called her a traitor. She was sad.

Now Bertha Lewis, who helped Wade and Dale cover up Dale’s embezzlement, wants the same kind of committee packed with corrupt friends of ACORN to whitewash all the institutional corruption that is the essence of the ACORN network. The network consists of, um, well, nobody knows how many hundreds of individual affiliated groups.

Bertha says that the panel will include

* John Podesta, President and CEO, Center for American Progress

* Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Board Member, RFK Foundation, former MD Lt. Governor

* Andrew Stern, International President, Service Employees International Union

* Henry Cisneros, Executive Chairman, Cityview

* John Banks, Vice President of Government Relations Con Ed

* Eric Eve, Senior VP of Global Consumer Group, Community Relations, Citigroup

* Harvey Hirschfeld, President, Lawcash

*Dave Beckwith, Executive Director, Needmor Fund

Bertha says the panel will be independent and will do a really good job recommending what should be done to fix ACORN. The problem is Bertha, who is only a figurehead anyway, has been lying for so long she might not even know what’s true and what’s false. That happens when you lie a lot, so you should always tell the truth.

The panel is filled with hardcore leftists who don’t like America’s Constitution and free markets. They want America to be more like France where they eat cheese, or maybe a little like the old Soviet Union where they ate each other. They hate freedom and will do anything to stamp it out. They believe the ends justify the means.

Hey, that’s just like ACORN and its spiritual grandfather, Saul Alinsky, isn’t it? He was very sneaky and very smart.

There’s John Podesta, who was President Clinton’s White House chief of staff. He’ll do anything that needs to be done to protect ACORN because ACORN is very important to progressives. If ACORN were to disintegrate, it would be like losing several army divisions when you’re fighting a war. That would be bad, liberals think.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is not very nice. She is mean. When she ran for governor in Maryland, an overwhelmingly Democratic state, she managed to completely mess things up. She loves calling people racists. It’s what she does. It’s one of the reasons people didn’t like her in Maryland even though she’s a Kennedy, and everybody loves Kennedys.

Andy Stern of SEIU is a longtime crusader for something called “social justice.” Social justice is when you have more toys than your friends, so your friends hit you over the head and take some of your toys away. That way everyone is equal. That’s social justice.

Marcel Reid isn’t buying any of this.

Marcel, who is now a member of a reform group called ACORN 8, told me this earlier today:

As former members of the Interim Management Committee elected by the national board of ACORN, we say that all of the things that this so-called independent panel is going to examine are things that we tried to accomplish. We called for all of these things –an audit, examination of the books, restructuring of the organization— all of this was already demanded by us.

And because we were trying to exercise due diligence as duly constituted directors of ACORN, we were relieved from our positions, forced out by the board under Bertha Lewis’s direction.

We have no idea how an independent, thorough audit of ACORN can be conducted by these people who were not selected by ACORN’s national board but were put in place by the same senior staff who conspired with Wade Rathke to cover up his brother’s embezzlement for eight years and who subsequently silenced any voice that called for truth, transparency and accountability.

You can see that Marcel doesn’t like Bertha very much. Bertha doesn’t like Marcel very much either. Oh well. Not everybody can be friends.

Meanwhile, my friend Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity writes that another phony-baloney panel has been created.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is headed by Phil Angelides who has deep ties to ACORN.

Whatever Angelides does, you can be sure he won’t blame ACORN for any of America’s problems.

And his commission’s report will be a fairy tale too.

THE END