The Working Families Party, an infamous ACORN front group notorious for corruption, was instrumental in organizing the Occupy Wall Street protests, according to radical journalist Laura Flanders of Free Speech TV.

The protests, which have spread to several other large U.S. cities, are part of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke calls an “anti-banking jihad.”

Working Families Party (WFP) organizer Nelini Stamp has “been here since day one and she is part of the organizing team and the outreach team that has managed to bridge the distance between that first day and this day and between the grassroots folks here and the labor movement,” Flanders said at the protest in lower Manhattan.

We are “actually trying to change the capitalist system we have today because it’s not working for any of us,” Stamp told Flanders in an interview. Demonstrators are asking “how do we really reform and bring revolutionary changes to the states?”

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Earlier this month, The New York Times ran a front page article that claimed, “an examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.”  The thesis of the article was that oil companies are the benefactors of enormous subsides, primarily through complicated maneuvering of offshore assets, “tax breaks,” and “loopholes.”

Unfortunately, the copy of the American tax code that The Times used to conduct their careful analysis appears to have been heavily edited by a cadre of left leaning groups, including ACORN President Maude Hurd, Citizens for Tax Justice, Center for American Progress and the Clean Energy Works campaign.

The smoking gun comes in the form of a leaked memo from CEW communications advisor and former Democratic congressional staffer David Di Martino just days after The New York Times ran it’s wildly misguided assessment of U.S. tax policy.

In the memo, Di Martino outlines a strategy to change America’s perception of increased taxes on energy producers as a tax on consumers by arguing “the American people already have a national energy tax — The Big Oil Welfare Tax — in the form of billions of dollars in subsidies to the wildly profitable big oil companies.”  The same day that Di Martino released his memo, Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) released their own defective and dishonest hit piece, titled “What Oil and Gas Companies Extract from the American Public.”   The tax breaks referred to by Di Martino and the CTJ memo, in reality, are the same credits that every American company receives for taxes paid overseas to foreign governments on income earned abroad.

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The ACORN crime syndicate is not going away anytime soon, but it’s going to look different.

ACORN will probably run out of money and fold by year’s end but a dozen ACORN state chapters reincorporated to seem like new, independent organizations will spring up in the next week to carry on ACORN’s business, a leaked email from ACORN’s online director suggests.

“The truth is that it is hard for us to forsee [sic] any scenario where ACORN continues beyond the end of 2010 and some of us think it might not last that long,” writes Nathan Henderson-James, director of ACORN’s online campaigns, in an apparently authentic Feb. 22 email.

“Last one to leave turn out the lights and wipe the server,” he writes at the end of the message.

In the email Henderson-James explains the subterfuge ACORN will use to lead Americans to believe ACORN is breaking apart.

“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. These are not just simple name changes, but reimaginings of how best to organize low and moderate income constitiuencies [sic] without any of the legal problems and funding issues dogging ACORN, not to mention the brand damage.”

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Yesterday, I finished the third part of my interview with Wade Rathke. I felt, correctly, or not that after spending several hours with Rathke, that I was starting to understand Rathke, his vision, and his goals. So, I tried to make these questions as pointed and interesting as possible.

1) What can the local, state, and federal government do right now to help the poor and middle class?

The answer that Rathke gave was both surprising and impressive. I expected him to rattle off several laws that could be implemented, maybe a moratorium on foreclosures, and other policy changes that he believed in. Instead, Rathke was practical and pithy.

He said that all government programs: unemployment insurance, welfare, etc. should be streamlined on the internet so that all citizens would be given access to electronic files. By doing this, the government would cut all sorts of red tape and save those in need all sorts of time and energy in receiving these benefits. For the money the government would spend in implementing these systems, the benefit to the people would come back ten fold.

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Allegations of continuing corruption continue to mount against the embattled Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). In the wake of tremendous negative publicity, much of which was featured here at Big Government, and adverse House and Senate votes ACORN has begun laying off dozens of low-level workers and staff across the country.

However, under conditions of strict anonymity, ACORN organizers and staff have complained to the ACORN 8 (www.acorn8.com) that senior management has ordered them to continue to work for ACORN as “volunteers” but for them to apply for unemployment insurance.

In order to legally collect unemployment insurance compensation, the applicant must attest that they are ready, willing and able to work elsewhere to qualify for benefits. This is unemployment insurance fraud. And fraudulently applying for unemployment insurance compensation is a crime.

When these allegations were first brought to the attention of the ACORN 8, we initially thought no way. This is unbelievable, no one in their right mind would ever agree to do this. But we kept hearing these same allegations, over and over again, from different people in different parts of the country. And this is ACORN – these are the same of workers who registered Mickey Mouse to vote and offered tax advice to a pimp and prostitute.

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ACORN’s CEO, Bertha Lewis announced last week that the group will seek an independent review of its operations. ACORN also announced that former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger would oversee the review. Although it seems difficult to imagine that the credentials of an attorney could allay public skepticism about the ethics of ACORN—especially in an era where lawyer-dominated institutions are frequently enmeshed in scandal—the professional background of Harshbarger makes him possibly the right person for the job.

That is, if ACORN—and Bertha Lewis—let him do the job.

Bertha Lewis is among the ACORN senior staff and Executive Committee members who actively concealed an apparently million dollar embezzlement from the organization by Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN founder and Lewis’ predecessor Wade Rathke.  So it is hard to believe Scott Harshbarger’s first line of business will be recommending or otherwise arranging for ACORN to fire Bertha Lewis and all her admitted, embezzlement concealing co-conspirators.

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September 11, 2009

Ms. Maude Hurd
President
ACORN
739 8th St SE
Washington, DC 20003

Dear Ms. Hurd:

The goal of the U.S. Census Bureau’s partnership program is to combine the strengths of state, local, and tribal governments, community-based organizations, faith-based organizations, schools, media, businesses and others to ensure an accurate 2010 Census. While not (sic) Census bureau employees, partners are advocates for census cooperation and participation. They serve a trusted voices within their communities and are critical to our strategy to count everyone once, only once, and in the right place.

The Census Bureau has established criteria for partnerships, which are listed on our Web site at www.census.gov and reserves the right to decline partnership or to terminate an existing partnership agreement with any group that 1) may create a negative connotation for the Census Bureau; 2) could distract from the Census Bureau’s mission; or, 3) may make people fearful of participating in the census.

To that end, and in keeping with the standards we shared with your organization and others who volunteered to partner with the Census Bureau to help promote the 2010 Census, we are today terminating our Partnership Agreement with ACORN.

Over the last several months, through ongoing communication with our regional offices, it is clear that ACORN’s affiliation with the 2010 Census promotion has caused sufficient concern in the general public, has indeed become a distraction from our mission, and may even become a discouragement to public cooperation, negatively impacting 2010 Census efforts. (more…)