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.

Friedman, who routinely chokes on his own robust self-esteem, is often a substitute host on the “Mike Malloy Show.” Malloy has serious, shall we say, psychiatric issues. He has called for the murder of former President George W. Bush, described Fox News as a “terrorist organization” that “wants to burn the country down,” and characterized Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) as a “whore,” “streetwalker,” and a “crazy bitch.”

Filling in for his straitjacket-worthy buddy Malloy a few days ago, Friedman, who is also a business partner of convicted “Speedway Bomber” Brett Kimberlin (see mugshot below), unloaded everything that has been bugging him about the alleged persecution of the ACORN crime syndicate. (The audio clip is available at Friedman’s blog. Click on “HOUR 1.”)

Friedman thinks the undercover “pimp and prostitute” videos are a hoax and that Andrew Breitbart should be in jail. He wants the videographers, James O’Keefe III and Hannah Giles, to “pay” for whatever it is they supposedly did to poor little ACORN. He accuses anyone who thinks voters should have to present ID in order to vote as engaging in “voter suppression.”

That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court denied an ACORN appeal, effectively ruling that Congress was absolutely entitled to cut off federal taxpayer funding of ACORN. Earlier today the high court denied the petition for certiorari in ACORN et al. v. United States (docket 10-1068) without comment.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now had asked the high court to review a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit which found that the funding cutoff enacted in 2009 was not a “bill of attainder” forbidden by the Constitution. ACORN had advanced the novel, nonsensical argument that Congress had no power to stop funding the group unless it could prove it had done something wrong.

As I write in my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, the ACORN network has taken in an astounding $79 million in federal funding, not just the $53 million figure previously reported.

At least 54 individuals associated with ACORN have been convicted of voter fraud. ACORN itself was convicted of felony voter registration fraud in Nevada in April, the book reports.

ACORN became well known nationwide in 2009 for its advocacy of brothels for pedophiles. Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe caught the group on undercover video offering advice on tax fraud and on importing underage illegal alien sex slaves from El Salvador.

Not surprisingly, a chorus of left-wingers has arisen to defend ACORN, making the argument that ACORN was somehow victimized by Breitbart and company. Among these useful idiots are Eric Alterman and Katrina vanden Heuvel of the Nation, Eric Boehlert of George Soros’s character assassination factory Media Matters for America, Joe Conason of Salon, Adam Serwer of the American Prospect, and terrorist-linked blogger Brad Friedman.

We haven’t heard the last of ACORN.

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

Breitbart, Giles, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota), Congressman Steve King (R-Iowa), Professor John Tierney of the Institute of World Politics, conservative leader Richard Viguerie, David Horowitz, Jason Mattera, and G. Gordon Liddy have endorsed the book.

Said Breitbart,

For too long the institutional left has been allowed to operate under cover of darkness because the Democrat-media complex refuses to hold them accountable. But these radicals who have been sticking it to Americans for decades scatter like cockroaches under the harsh spotlight of Matthew Vadum’s great new book, Subversion Inc.

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

(Obamacorn logo by Leo Alberti)

Amazingly, ACORN’s 40 years of lawlessness have been heavily subsidized by taxpayers. From the federal government alone, the ACORN network has received at least $79 million in federal taxpayer funding. No one knows how many millions of dollars ACORN has taken in from states and localities. Yet as of November 2009, ACORN was a tax deadbeat, owing more than $2.3 million in back taxes to all levels of government.

Bertha Lewis

You don’t have to take my word that ACORN will soon arise from the ashes. Nathan Henderson-James, longtime director of the group’s online campaigns, confirmed in a leaked February 2010 e-mail that ACORN plans to come back. America’s most notorious nonprofit felt it needed to perform this trick because its employees were caught red-handed repeatedly counseling a fake pimp and prostitute on the finer points of establishing a brothel for pedophiles. ACORN calculated that people would forget the transgressions of the taxpayer-subsidized nonprofit best known for its voter fraud efforts.

In the e-mail that came five months after conservative activist-journalists James O’Keefe III and Hannah Giles punked ACORN with their “pimp and pro” routine, Henderson-James explained the group’s ongoing hoax that consists of its state chapters separately incorporating under new, innocuous-sounding names. “It is definitely true that over the next week or so we should see a dozen or more organizations launched on the state level by staff who used to work for ACORN and leaders who developed their skills as ACORN members,” he wrote. “These are not just simple name changes, but reimaginings of how best to organize” low and moderate income constituencies “without any of the legal problems and funding issues dogging ACORN, not to mention the brand damage.” Stepping out of the spotlight for a while is a “tactically smart … reaction to the global situation that helps the work of building power for poor people to continue,” he wrote.

The secret operation was already underway when Henderson-James bragged about the effort to his radical and liberal friends on Townhouse, an invitation only left-wingers’ online discussion forum run by Matt Stoller, who was senior policy adviser to colorful former Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla. In late 2009 and early 2010, ACORN staffers across America created a plethora of separate organizations aimed at carrying on ACORN’s corrupt affairs.

Among them were Arkansas Community Organizations, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, New England United for Justice, Missourians Organizing for Reform & Empowerment, New York Communities for Change, Pennsylvania Neighborhoods for Social Justice, and Pennsylvania Communities Organizing for Change. Almost all of the “new” groups operate out of old ACORN offices and are run by old ACORN hands. ACORN’s housing bubble generator, ACORN Housing, changed its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America after the undercover video saga. The organization has long served as the ACORN network’s cash cow, funneling millions of dollars to other affiliates in ACORN’s far-flung empire of activism.

ACORN’s court historian John Atlas also confirmed that the undead group plans to resurface under a new name after the 2010 elections. A new entity tentatively called the Community Action Support Center (CASC) will be created “to provide a range of training, technical assistance, and oversight services to the new community organizations,” he wrote last year in his institutional hagiography of ACORN, Seeds of Change. ACORN’s Brian Kettenring will be interim executive director. ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis plans to create a Black Leadership Institute. Executive Director Steve Kest quit ACORN “but will work with the new community groups in a consulting and voluntary capacity.” Kest later became a “senior fellow” at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which is run by Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta.

“The emerging community organizations will retain ACORN’s commitment to building national power, and are beginning discussions toward a process to federate at some later date, presumably after the 2010 elections or in 2011,” Atlas writes.

The new groups’ focus will be on localities and states. CASC “will support the continuation of organizing around jobs and low-wage work, bank lending and foreclosures, immigration, state fiscal crises, civic engagement, and green jobs and environmental justice.” ACORN leaders are working on “voter engagement activities.” They intend “to engage the surge voters of 2008 and turn them into permanent voters in 2010 and beyond.” ACORN’s fraud-prone Project Vote affiliate continues to operate. It ran a nationwide voter registration and get-out-the-vote drive during the 2010 election cycle.

Despite its history of election fraud, it continues to operate undisturbed, doing business as usual. Project Vote, which used to employ President Obama, even let disgraced ACORN executive Amy Adele Busefink run its 2010 voter drive. Charges were pending against her the whole time she ran the 2010 voter registration and get-out-the-vote effort. Talk about an understanding employer!

Busefink’s job performance in the 2008 election cycle didn’t seem to bother Project Vote. The New York Times reported that Project Vote was forced to admit that 850,000 of the 1.3 million registrations from allegedly new voters were not from new voters at all. About 400,000 of the registrations “were rejected by election officials for a variety of reasons, including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms and fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers.” ACORN acknowledged it fired “829 of the 10,000 canvassers it hired during the election for job-related problems, including falsifying registration forms.”

Busefink and her subordinate were implicated in a massive conspiracy to commit voter registration fraud in Nevada. Her underling took a plea bargain, and Busefink cut her own deal with prosecutors in hopes of avoiding prison time. She entered an “Alford plea,” which is similar to a “no contest” plea. In January 2011, she received a two-year suspended sentence.

(Look on Big Government tomorrow for Part 3. This article is excerpted from “Subversion Inc.: A new book reveals how Obama’s ACORN friends are still ripping off American taxpayers,” by Matthew Vadum which was published in the May 2011 issue of Townhall magazine and is republished here with permission. Copyright © 2011 by Matthew Vadum.)

An award-winning investigative journalist, Matthew Vadum is a senior editor at Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. Vadum is author of the new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers (WND Books), from which this piece is adapted. Of the book Andrew Breitbart says, “For too long the institutional left has been allowed to operate under cover of darkness because the Democrat-media complex refuses to hold them accountable. But these radicals who have been sticking it to Americans for decades scatter like cockroaches under the harsh spotlight of Matthew Vadum’s great new book, Subversion Inc.”

Investigators must have felt it was necessary to urge the funding cutoff because the federal government’s prohibition on funding ACORN isn’t a permanent ban. It exists at the whim of lawmakers and runs out at the end of this month. This is the finding of an analysis by Capital Research Center (which has been tracking ACORN since 1998).

Investigators may also have wanted to remind the public that ACORN is still alive. Reports of ACORN’s demise continue to be churned out by misinformed journalists who  amplify the zombie group’s lies. In recent days the Washington Post incorrectly described ACORN as “a dead NGO,” and Slate said ACORN has “stopped existing.” More on this in a moment.

The Sept. 21 report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Inspector General found that ACORN Housing, which changed its name earlier this year to Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHC), may have concealed fraud by destroying or failing to produce records.

ACORN violated federal rules on how grants are to be used. The group charged the government salary costs for employees after they were terminated, the report said, and violated federal procurement standards.

The report suggested ACORN corruptly funneled taxpayer dollars to its affiliates and engaged in money laundering. ACORN has taken in more than $19 million in housing counseling grants since 1995 from HUD. NeighborWorks, a congressionally chartered nonprofit, gave ACORN $25.9 million. ACORN Housing has received more than $27.3 million from other federal and non-federal sources, the report said.

The report urged HUD to force ACORN Housing to improve its record-keeping and recommended the ACORN affiliate be placed on “inactive” status while it “initiates corrective actions to address the exceptions and recommendations in this report.”

“Any organization that applies for and accepts taxpayer dollars has a responsibility to act consistently with federal law,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). “It doesn’t matter if it’s ten dollars or ten thousand dollars, there is no acceptable amount of abuse or mismanagement that the federal government should tolerate when it comes to the taxpayer’s dollars.”

Issa is ranking minority member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He is expected to become chairman if Republicans win control of the House in November.

Many Americans –and some lawmakers— seem to believe Congress cut off ACORN permanently, but this belief appears to be unfounded.

This confusion about ACORN can probably be blamed in part on the quirks of parliamentary procedure and the complexity of the appropriations process. The legal language prohibiting the funding is contained in spending legislation that covers only the federal government’s current fiscal year which ends this Sept. 30. The House and the Senate first passed legislation banning funding for ACORN in fall 2009 after undercover videos showed ACORN Housing employees offering activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles “how to” advice on establishing a brothel, defrauding the government and banks, and evading other laws.

Mass media news reports rarely explain details of spending bills, such as when the fiscal year they cover comes to an end. But the fact that the funding ban is not permanent was noticed by ACORN lawyers and Judge Roger J. Miner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Miner wrote the court’s opinion in August that overturned Judge Nina Gershon’s perverse ruling that the funding ban was an unconstitutional “bill of attainder” that punished ACORN without a trial.

Public Law 111-68, signed by President Obama on Oct. 1, 2009, is formally known as “An Act making appropriations for the Legislative Branch for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2010, and for other purposes.” [emphasis added] Section 163 of the Act reads: “None of the funds made available by this joint resolution or any prior Act may be provided to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, or allied organizations.”

Similar de-funding language was included in other spending bills signed into law by President Obama that followed in the weeks after. All those bills covered federal spending only for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2010. (See Section 427 of Public Law 111-88; Division A – Section 418, Division B – Section 534, and Division E – Section 511 of Public Law 111-117; Section 8124 of Public Law 111-118.)

Plans to extend the funding ban are in the works in Congress. Section 417 of the Transportation-HUD appropriations bill for fiscal 2011 (S.3644) would prohibit funding of ACORN in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, 2010. It’s very unlikely that the bill will become law by Oct. 1 but Congress may also extend the funding ban in new stopgap spending legislation – though there’s no guarantee that will happen.

Then there’s lazy reporting that may have also added to public confusion.

Most reporters uncritically accepted ACORN’s false claim to have shut down earlier this year despite abundant evidence to the contrary. ACORN said it dissolved its national structure on April Fool’s Day, yet the group continues to operate out of its headquarters in Brooklyn. Two weeks after the alleged shutdown Chief Organizer Bertha Lewis sent out a fundraising letter boasting that “ACORN is alive because you are alive and still fighting for justice.” Lawyer Arthur Z. Schwartz is still representing ACORN. He sent a letter June 9 to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) demanding changes to a report on his client.

Both ACORN operative Nathan Henderson-James and ACORN hagiographer John Atlas have admitted the shuttering of the ACORN network is a sham. Issa’s investigators also reported that Lewis has been busy consolidating and hoarding ACORN’s assets. ACORN reportedly has $10 million in property and $20 million in cash in 800 bank accounts. Like grifters who adopt new aliases in order to keep duping victims, ACORN chapters in 13 states and the District of Columbia have incorporated themselves under new names. Many of the “new” re-branded groups have the same employees and board members and addresses as the old ACORN chapters.

That’s a lot of activity for a group that’s dead.

It also marked a new chapter in on-line media. Most of the conservative on-line media are scorekeepers. The provide opinion, but don’t really move the ball forward. I know that sounds both hyperbolic and self-serving, but consider: after the second day of our video release the U.S. Senate voted to defund ACORN and the Census Bureau severed all ties with the embattled organization. All of this happened before either the Washington Post or New York Times had devoted a single column inch to the burgeoning scandal. I’ve been in Washington D.C. for 16 years. Nothing politically happened until one of those papers weighed in. Until last year. The game totally changed and, even today, neither the JournoList-supporting Post nor the hemorrhaging Times understands this. Newsweek is dead. USA Today is shedding staff as fast as it can while Time clings to life as something to glance at on an airplane and every other part of the legacy media retires to “background noise.”  Simply put, no one cares about them anymore.

There was a time that news organizations like the Post and the Times could set the national agenda. They were the arbiters of what was news and what was “important.” A wink from one of their reporters would set off a national debate. If they ignored a story, well, it went nowhere. They were the “casting couch” of all possible news. Those days are over.

I won’t go through all of the details, but Big Government was essentially launched because of the grass-roots uprising we’ve witnessed over the past year. We felt that, whether the debate was about stimulus, TARP, ObamaCare, Cap and Trade or bailouts, the fundamental issue that had galvanized the American public was the inexorable growth of government.  They rightfully didn’t like what politicians in DC and state capitals (from both parties) were pushing down their throats. Big Government was for all of those patriots who rejected being lectured to or managed by an increasingly isolated political class. Try Freedom was our existential message.

It has been a wild ride.

We have broken a lot of stories beyond ACORN. From Jim Hoft’s great expose on Kevin Jennings, Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar,” to Liberty Chick and Don Loos’ great reporting on SEIU, Big Government has brought you actual news…rather than, as most do, simple commentary. We broke three videos: Phil “I Don’t Worry About the Constitution” Hare, Bob “Who Are You” Etheridge and Ciro “You Are Calling Me a Liar” Rodrigeuz that may have a real impact on the elections in November.

But, there has been so much more. The Build-a-Bear silliness, the first reporting of ObamaCare rationing with the de-listing of Avastin, the uncomfortably close ties between Google and the Administration and the only real defense of the “Tea Party Movement” against a baseless smear of racism. (Yes, we have noted who didn’t rise to the defense in the same way. Short answer: Most of the “tea party movement.”) And much more.

There is much more planned for this year. But, we can’t do any of this without you. You are why we created this site and, every day, you give us the inspiration to keep fighting. We were born to fight, but, without you and our great contributors, we would be fighting a fool’s game. You all give us the strength to keep up the fight. Your ongoing commitment to the fight gives us inspiration to strive and do better.

America has awoken from its slumber. We are ready.

A complaint filed July 7, 2010 indicates ACORN employee Juan Carlos Vera (seen here in the ACORN San Diego investigation) is suing James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles in federal court for at least $75,000.  Vera alleges Giles and O’Keefe violated the Invasion of Privacy Act when they videotaped him giving advice regarding underage prostitution to the fake pimp and prostitute in 2009.

You can view the whole complaint here at Last Blog on Earth.

Vera worked at the National City ACORN branch, which was also the site of the document dump scandal (chronicled here) where ACORN employees discarded thousands of documents containing social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, immigration records, tax returns, etc. in a public dumpster ahead of Jerry Brown’s investigation of the community organizing group.

We’ll have more as this story develops.