University of Wisconsin Professor Joel Rogers wants to build a lefty alternative to the ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. He recently hit up some of his students for help with the project, while they were waiting for their grades in his class.

This from our first article in an ongoing investigation conducted by the MacIver News Service. Future stories will focus on any official reaction we receive from the University and an indepth look at Rogers’ Center on Wisconsin Strategy.

Joel Rogers Says College Credits May Be Available to Those Who Help Build Liberal Alternative to ALEC

[Madison, Wisc…] One of the University of Wisconsin’s most renowned liberal professors attempted to recruit his students to work on an elaborate private political project while final grades in their class were pending, the MacIver News Service has learned.

At the conclusion of his end-of-the-year email to his UW Law School students, Professor Joel Rogers wrote: “I think I mentioned a little project I’m doing now — which thus far involves professors from such crummy law schools as Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, Virgina [sic] and elsewhere, but thus far, beyond your lonesome, NOBODY from UW — to build a partial counter to ALEC. It’s going to involve a lot of law students. If you’re interested in helping out with that (no money, but possible credit), or know of somebody else who might be, please let me, or even better, “Nate Ela” <nela@cows.org>, a lawyer and now sociology grad student, know. Project description attached.“

Rogers is the Director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan, educational, and charitable organization. COWS was founded in 1992 by Rogers, a professor of Law, Political Science, and Sociology at UW-Madison and a longtime commentator on economic development and democratic institutions. COWS is based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the Social Science Building.

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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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Two of the targets of last Friday’s raid against “anti-war” revolutionaries were early prominent leaders of Barack Obama’s New Party in Illinois.

From the Illinois New Party website on May 5th 1998:

Building the People’s Machine in the 35th Ward

The thirteenth precinct did superbly. We won it big in ‘96, and did so again this time – by about 25 votes. And then the 15th came in. Joe Iosbaker, our precinct captain there, was almost in tears. He had been working election day at this same precinct for progressive candidates for about a decade – since Harold Washington won re-election in 1987. But in all that time, he had never seen results like this. Elba Rodriguez: 47, Willie Delgado: 92! Other precinct workers were patting Joe on the back and shaking his hand. “It was a team effort,” he kept repeating, acknowledging the great work done by the 15th precinct crew of Yakira Nunez, Mary Robles, Sergio Vargas, Peter Shearn, and Stephanie Weiner – Joe’s wife, who has also been working that precinct for about 10 years.

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When a candidate of the Democratic or Republican parties is successfully elected President of the United States, it is widely accepted that by virtue of being the highest elected office holder in the party, they are the “leader” of their respective party.

Why would it be any different when it comes to President Obama’s leadership role in his other political party, the Working Families Party?

If the President and his other party are to be held to the same standard as the Republicans, Greens, and Democrats, etc.. then by all rights he should be considered the leading force or figure within the Working Families Party.

In reality, no matter how one chooses to define the President’s relationship to his other party, the relationship itself demands a close examination of its platform, background, and history, all of which the President would appear to have endorsed by accepting their nomination.

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Blogger Andrew Marcus has a timely piece over at his Founding Bloggers blog:

Founding Bloggers can exclusively confirm that as of 2000, ACORN listed the Working Families Party as an affiliate of ACORN. They also listed the New Party as an affiliate.

Click here or the image below to view full size:

To drive the relationship home for you, ACORN and Project Vote shared office space with Working Families Party and the New Party in NYC, Arkansas, and Illinois!

Are people supposed to believe that ACORN shared office space with Project Vote and these political parties, and they never talked or shared resources or funding? What are the odds that these arrangements led to an unhealthy, if not illegal, mix of federal tax dollars and political organizing?

Read the whole piece here.