Evidence suggests that ACORN, the left’s premiere astro-turfing organization, has been paying people to participate in the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Astro-turfing campaigns can generate big money, and ACORN’s lucrative protest-for-profit program is nothing new. As I note in my book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, ACORN has acquired great expertise in manufacturing so-called grassroots protests.

Left-wing billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler, the founders of World Savings Bank, gave ACORN affiliates close to $11 million to manufacture mobs to protest their competition in subprime mortgage lending. The United Federation of Teachers paid ACORN $500,000 to create a spontaneous uprising against charter schools in Manhattan.

The SEIU-funded Working Families Party, a front group for ACORN, placed a want ad on Craigslist dated Sept. 26. The ad indicates that WFP was recruiting activists to carry out “direct action,” leftist argot for a variety of activities aimed at forcing sociopolitical change.

The line between direct action and violent terrorism can become blurry. Extreme forms of direct action can lead to bodily injury and sometimes death. The labor movement is no stranger to assault and killings. Left-wing activists David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin participated in an attack on an armored car that left two police officers and a security guard dead. Two anarchists tried to disrupt the 2008 GOP convention with Molotov cocktails. The eco-terrorist Sea Shepherd Conservation Society admits both to attacking whaling ships with acid and sinking them.

WFP’s ad is titled, “FIGHT TO HOLD WALLSTREET [sic] ACCOUNTABLE NOW! MAKE A DIFFERNENCE [sic] GET PAID!” It states:

The WFP is seeking immediate hires.

You must be an energetic communicator, with a passion for social and economic justice.

Only outgoing, articulate dedicated, determined candidates will be considered for the positions.

For those candidates that qualify WFP offers substantial paid-training provided by senior leadership, on varied issues such as: advocacy, public speaking, mobilizing, fundraising, networking and organizing. We invest in passionate people with excellent communication skills and a full benefits package is offered to those candidates that qualify. In addition, there is opportunity for advancement and travel to our satellite chapters and out of state affiliates.

This is not a policy job! Through direct action you will be shaping NY state politics for the next 20 years.” [emphasis added]

As previously reported, WFP has been involved in organizing the Occupy Wall Street protests since the beginning.

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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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Does President Obama approve of the SEIU/ACORN-led economic terrorism campaign that is now directed at JPMorgan Chase?

It seems like a reasonable question to ask. SEIU is President Obama’s favorite union and ACORN is his favorite community organizing outfit.

The campaign, engineered by SEIU board member Stephen Lerner, is designed, in Lerner’s words, “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.”

According to White House visitor logs, “Stephen Lerner” paid four visits to the Obama White House. On two of those visits he apparently met with then-White House political director Patrick Gaspard, a former executive vice president at the militant SEIU Local 1199. Gaspard, a longtime ACORN operative and Alinskyite, is now executive director of the DNC where he oversees the odious Organizing for America project.

I wonder what they talked about. Hmmmm.

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Why is the Obama administration defying federal law by funding ACORN?

Judicial Watch discovered that the president is flouting the will of Congress by surreptitiously giving federal taxpayer money to ACORN, his former employer and legal client. This is the first such grant to surface this year but more are certain to follow.

Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) gave a $79,819 grant to a Florida office of the largest branch of the ACORN tree, the massive conglomerate known as ACORN Housing Corp. (AHC). AHC filed papers last year legally changing its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA). Despite the nifty new moniker, it’s the same old corrupt, antisocial organization.

As I wrote in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, ACORN Housing grew out of crime: trespassing. It emerged from a 1982 squatting campaign in which ACORN built a squatters’ tent city behind the White House. Rampaging ACORN activists break in and illegally occupy property already owned by others – and your tax dollars subsidize this criminal activity.

The secretary of HUD is Shaun Donovan. Donovan and ACORN are tight. (Donovan and ACORN’s then-chief organizer Bertha Lewis are seen in the above screen grab from footage shot for the documentary film Battle for Brooklyn.)

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(continued from Part 2)

It should come as no surprise that on the campaign trail, President Obama refused to be interviewed about Saul Alinsky, the community organizing guru who wrote Rules for Radicals, a how-to guide for destroying American capitalism and democracy.

Presumably Obama, who taught courses on Alinsky’s brutal, sometimes violent organizing techniques, declined to speak to reporters about the late guru. He must have realized that such an interview would throw an unwanted spotlight on Alinsky’s radicalism, and by extension, his own. Such counterproductive publicity would also have undermined the candidate’s efforts to reinvent himself as a moderate. Alinsky’s adherents now dominate the modern Democratic Party establishment. Apart from President Obama himself, they include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, Federal Communications Commission diversity chief Mark Lloyd, Obama’s ex-green jobs czar Van Jones, former DNC trainer Heather Booth, Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to name just a few. “Who the hell isn’t [an Alinskyite] in this administration?” asks conservative author David Horowitz.

And President Obama hasn’t been the only longtime ACORN operative working in the White House. There’s also the low-profile Patrick Gaspard who, until recently, was White House political affairs director, one of the titles Karl Rove held in President Bush’s White House.

In a move that ought to disturb anyone who cares about the integrity of the democratic process, earlier this year Gaspard took over the reins of the Democratic National Committee as its executive director—just in time to begin initial preparations for President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

Gaspard hails from the same world of radical left-wing community organizing that made Barack Obama who he is today. Gaspard is an expert in the harsh, street-smart organizing tactics taught by Alinsky. He’s the hatchet man Obama sent to New York over a year ago to strong-arm then-Gov. David Paterson into dropping his reelection campaign. As executive director running the DNC’s day-to-day operations, Gaspard will oversee Organizing for America, a project of the DNC supposedly modeled on Alinskyite organizing principles.

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It looks like Matt Damon’s been overdosing on Kool-Aid again.  He’s apparently doing the bidding now for the ACORN spawn, Working Families Party.  Watch as he asks you for his birthday present.

I’m about to celebrate a very important birthday myself, Matt.  On November 13^th, I turn 41 ! I know, I can’t believe it either.

If there’s something you want to give me for my birthday that’s going to really cheer me up, please tell the recently departing Working Families Party co-chair Bertha Lewis to stop referring to constitutional conservatism as “McCarthyism”.  And while you’re at it, could you please ask your friend, President Obama not to call American citizens “enemies” simply for not belonging to his political party?

I think maybe it’s time to step away from Soroswood and start paying attention to the real world.

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It’s well understood that the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association are far-left organizations.  While many of their members don’t pay much attention to the tactics and vitriol of the teachers unions, virtually every single public school employee funds those activities, in far too many states with no choice.

And sadly, rank-and-file teachers, who probably aren’t like the leftists that run the national unions, don’t speak up or take their dues back.  So they perpetuate the problem.

So it was a big disturbing – but completely predictable - to see the American Federation of Teachers recent convention used as a platform for NAACP president Ben Jealous to launch his tirade against the Tea Party, which culminated with a condemnation of it at his own convention.

So as this group of folks who drink tea and apparently are very gainfully employed according to all the polls say they’re going to take this country back, I suggest we take them very seriously.  ‘Cause they will take us right back to the 18th Century if we let them. (applause)

And my white dad would remind my black mama that the 18th Century wasn’t that good for anybody. … We have got to reacquaint these tea drinkers with volunteers who drink coffee.

Is this what the rank-and-file public school teacher believes?  Is this was they want to fund?

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Has Congressman Darrell Issa’s request that White House Political Director Patrick Gaspard explain his failure to report a $37,000 payment from his previous employer SEIU[i] Local 1199 evolved into a cover-up?    It’s beginning to smell like it!

Rep. Issa’s request refers to the same Patrick Gaspard who while working for a Soros-SEIU political committee employed convicted felons to go door-to-door.  In fact, that same Soros-SEIU committee received one of the steepest fines in Federal Election Commission history ($750,000) because its leadership, in Machiavellian fashion, chose to ignore federal laws and take the risk of paying fines if caught.  So, ignoring a few pesky public disclosure laws is not as unlikely as it may sound.

Politico was first to provide the White House narrative that “Gaspard forgot” and that his actions require only “small administrative change” in its coverage:

“We have made the small administrative change to this year’s and last year’s forms to indicate that part of the final payment to Patrick reflected their typical severance of one week of pay for each of his nine years of service at Local 1199 of SEIU,” [White House spokesman Bill] Burton wrote POLITICO in an e-mailed statement.

Such financial disclosures are governed by federal law, but Stan Brand, a former House general counsel and ethics expert, said the Justice Department is unlikely to pursue an investigation unless they suspected a “knowing or willful” intent to deceive.

But, crosschecking Gaspard’s financial disclosure reports with SEIU financial reports and Obama campaign reports reveal that Gaspard’s recent revisions remain inconsistent and with that may rise to the “knowing or willful” standard mentioned in the Politico article. (more…)

It was common knowledge that SEIU and ACORN were of the same tree prior to the James O’Keefe/Hannah Giles coast-to-coast video sting.  At ACORNcracked.com, I chronicled nearly two dozen SEIU contributions to ACORN in just a few years.

In 2009, SEIU gave to a variety of ACORN affiliates both before and after the sting videos began to be released.  Consider these:

The last one, Citizens Services Inc, is particularly interesting, given that CSI was the entity Obama for America also hired for campaign work, as Michelle Malkin pointed out.

SEIU 1199, the largest local affiliate of the national union (and former employer of White House Political Director Patrick Gaspard), gave a whopping $550,000 to the Working Families Party in 2009.  WFP was co-founded by ACORN.

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Earlier last year, ACORN founder Wade Rathke glowingly blogged that Patrick Gaspard, political director of the White House, was a former ACORN organizer.  When that claim started receiving a bit of attention, Rathke offered a retraction, saying his memory was playing tricks on him. Right, Wade, right…

What is indisputable about Patrick Gaspard is that at one time, he was the Executive Vice President of SEIU Local 1199, the New York City-based chapter that is the largest of all SEIU locals.  At some point in late 2007 or early 2008, Gaspard allegedly left SEIU to join the Obama campaign.

Obama won the primary, and ultimately the general election, and Gaspard was named the Director of Political Affairs in the White House – a heady and important job.

So it should give transparency and clean government advocates a bit of concern to see in calendar year 2009, Gaspard received a whopping $37,191 from SEIU 1199.  Assuming he officially became a federal employee on January 20^th (Inauguration Day), it amounted to nearly $2,000 a day in compensation.

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[Ed: This excerpt is the second in a series of articles originally reported at City Hall. Go here for Part I in the series. Lead reporter on City Hall investigation was Edward-Isasc Dovere.]

The Working Families Organization, a tax-exempt 501(c)4, was legally created with a certificate of incorporation filed with the New York Department of State on July 12, 2006. Despite the similarities in the names, this paperwork established the Working Families Organization as a legally separate entity.

That certificate lists four initial directors, starting with now-White House political director Patrick Gaspard, who was then a board member of the Working Families Party. The other three were ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis, Robert Master of the Communications Workers of America and Sam Williams of the United Auto Workers. These three also were and remain the three co-chairs of the Working Families Party.

Kevin Finnegan, who is now the political director for the 1199 Service Employees International Union, but who was then an attorney at Levy Ratner PC, signed the document as the incorporator. Finnegan is also the notary on the official Party rules filed with the Board of Elections and the lawyer who set up Data and Field Services.

The incorporation forms and other documents, like the Organization’s paperwork filed with the IRS, must be made public as a condition of its tax-exempt status. However, the process takes years, meaning that the most recent forms that are completed and available are from 2007.

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[Ed Note: Recently, City Hall in New York published an amazing multi-part investigative piece on possible corruption, illegal activities and general shadiness within the multi-pronged Working Families Party in New York. For those of you searching for examples of what investigative journalism used to be like, this series is a good place to start. Under the direction of lead reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere, the series explored the tangled web the Party in New York. Big Government readers will note that one of the co-chairs of the Party is Working Families Party is Bertha Lewis, CEO of ACORN. So, for those keeping score at home, this is the second organization headed by Lewis is that marked by opaque and confusing interrelationships and ethically-challenged legal boundaries. Hmm, what are the odds? Today begins Part I]

In August, City Hall published an investigative report explaining the operations of the Working Families Party’s for-profit company, Data & Field Services. In early September, after conducting its own review, the New York City Campaign Finance Board officially declared that “DFS exists as an arm of the Working Families Party.” Over the last three months, City Hall has continued the investigation, relying on dozens of interviews with people within and outside the organization, in addition to a review of tax, lobbying and campaign finance records, as well as confidential internal documents.

Following weeks of in-depth inquiries from City Hall, the Working Families Party announced on Nov. 6 that it was hiring the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom to conduct a review of its practices, with the effort to be led by Judith Kaye, the former chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals.

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Attorney General Eric Holder has made it abundantly clear he has absolutely no interest in investigating his radical friends at ACORN.

Holder’s Justice Department released a legal opinion last week that allows the Obama administration to ignore the will of Congress which has voted overwhelmingly to suspend federal funding of ACORN until at least Dec. 18. He’s also ignored the 88-page report on ACORN’s systemic corruption and flagrant racketeering activities that was issued this summer by Republican investigators on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Apparently, public outrage at the continuing antics of the corrupt radical advocacy group that used to employ President Obama and White House political director Patrick Gaspard counts for nothing.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (center) with ACORN ally Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (left), and former California Gov. Gray Davis (right).

But Americans really shouldn’t be surprised that Attorney General Holder is bending over backwards to help his radical friends at ACORN.

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When a small sampling of the White House guest list was revealed several days, Obama campaign bankroller SEIU was at the top of the list.  Having spent over $60 million to elect Obama, why should we expect anything different?

Earlier this year, SEIU president Andy Stern admitted he holds weekly meetings at the White House and, according to the guest list, several with the president himself.  That makes Andy Stern one important man.  Perhaps one of the most important in Washington, in fact.

Andy Stern has long been labeled a ruthless, bare-knuckled union organizer.  His union has a significant portion of its membership made up of health care workers and, not surprisingly, has been of the groups most aggressively pushing for socialized medicine.

Stern’s SEIU has been very aggressive at increasing its membership, often employing intimidation to meet its ends.  Just one example: In, 2008 SEIU thugs beat up members, mainly women, from rival unions at a labor union convention.  SEIU then issued a press release entitled, “SEIU Members Stand Up for the Future of the Labor Movement and the Interests of All Workers.”

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A Staten Island Democrat is blaming her city council loss on ACORN.  Apparently she didn’t know her political consultant, Scott Levenson of the Advance Group, was the same Scott Levenson that has been relentlessly defending ACORN.

Levenson has served as ACORN’s crisis communications consultant and needless to say, he’s been a busy man.

Nevertheless, Janine Materna’s loss for the South Shores City Council is ACORN’s fault.  From the Staten Island Advance:

Democrat Janine Materna’s campaign is considering suing its consulting firm, the Advance Group, for $1 million, and claimed that consultant Scott Levenson’s position with the controversial ACORN group was among the reasons Ms. Materna lost the South Shore City Council race.

“It’s because of him that Janine lost the election,” said Jodi Materna, her sister’s campaign manager.

She said the campaign did not know of Levenson’s ACORN affiliation and if it had, “we never would have hired him.”

…

Levenson, ACORN’s national spokesman, said it was a “true sign of political immaturity to scapegoat anyone for Janine’s loss.”

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It’s becoming more and more difficult for the Obama White House to deny that White House political director Patrick Gaspard has strong, longstanding ties to the corrupt activist group ACORN.

Gaspard is a longtime operative for ACORN and one of its political parties, New York’s Working Families Party.

Internal ACORN documents show Gaspard gave ACORN $40,000 over the past two years while he worked as an executive vice president of Service Employees International Union Local 1199 in New York.

That’s an awfully large tithe for someone who made $111,894 in 2007 and who has a wife and two children. The $111,894 figure comes from SEIU 1199′s most recent publicly available tax return.

Moreover, Gaspard hails from New York which has a crushing tax burden, especially for individuals earning six-figure salaries — and he lived in the upscale neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn. It was unclear at press time if Gaspard’s wife contributes to the family fisc.

It is also entirely possible that the $40,000 Gaspard handed over to ACORN was SEIU money.

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White House political director Patrick Gaspard met with ACORN spokesman and lobbyist Scott Levenson, a former co-worker, at the White House the Obama administration disclosed Friday.

Levenson’s inclusion in the newly released list of visitors to the Obama White House makes the president’s claim he’s clueless about his former employer ACORN — and its election fraud trials and tribulations — especially difficult to believe. That’s because Gaspard is President Obama’s right hand man. Some describe him as the new Karl Rove.

The purpose of the visit by Levenson (pictured below) who met with Gaspard in March was not disclosed.

The relentlessly combative Levenson, who is also a registered lobbyist for New York ACORN, was thrown out of Glenn Beck’s TV studio May 6 for suggesting during a commercial break that the TV host was racist for daring to challenge ACORN. Levenson’s been helping to coordinate ACORN’s public disinformation strategy which relies heavily on lies and misdirection.

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Did ACORN’s Working Families Party steal an election in New York?

Fox News is reporting that absentee ballots were fraudulently cast with stolen identities, and that the number of allegedly fraudulent votes was enough to potentially tip the election in the favor of Working Families Party candidates.

Brian Suozzo voted with an absentee ballot in the Working Families Party primary on Sept. 15 because, as his application stated, he was “at home recovering from medical procedure.”

Jessica Boomhower’s application said she would be attending a “work conference in Boston.”

Michael Ward couldn’t vote in person because he was “taking care of elderly parent.”

Kimberlee Truell was on a “Bus trip to casino,” as was Miguel Vazques.

The only problem with these absentee ballot records at the Rensselaer County Board of Elections in Troy, N.Y., is that they’re phony, voters and investigators say — and they’ve prompted what’s being called an unprecedented investigation of suspected voter fraud.

One person who must comment on these developments is ACORN Chief Organizer and Working Families Party co-founder, Bertha Lewis.

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Did ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis say anything that was true in her recent speech at the National Press Club?

The embattled ACORN CEO deserved an Academy Award nomination for her virtuoso performance in which she not only depicted ACORN as an innocent victim but also as a whistleblower that tried to nip the subprime mortgage crisis in the bud.

She blamed everyone but herself: “We’ve seen this play before, whether it was the civil rights movement or whatever, when you organize poor people to have real power, what you do is often turned against you.”

She blamed Republicans: “The RNC…because we’ve been inflated as the boogeyman, raises almost $2 million a day, every day, and this form of modern-day ACORN McCarthyism has got to stop.”

Lewis’s statement about the Republican National Committee was immediately torpedoed by RNC chairman Michael Steele who defended ACORN.

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Several days ago, Capital Research Center’s Matthew Vadum published research here indicating an ACORN alumni in the White House (other than the president): Political Director Patrick Gaspard.  As I did three weeks prior at ACORNcracked.com, Matthew used a Wade Rathke blog as the source, which Rathke, the founder of ACORN,  immediately changed after Vadum’s report, citing “memory tricks.”  Politico led the way in poo-pooing the connection once Rathke played cover-up.

Rathke said it not only on his blog, but also at a book signing in New Orleans, which was recently covered in the Fox News Special: The Truth About ACORN.”  While we attended that book signing and were not able to get that portion on tape, the Fox documentary crew did.  Sadly, the remarks apparently ended up on the cutting room floor.

The fact is, Patrick Gaspard, Obama’s “Glue Man,” is more important than Van Jones ever hoped of being.  The fact is, one of the most critical and influential jobs in a White House, the Director of Political Affairs, is occupied by a former SEIU health care lobbyist and ACORN organizer.  To be exact, he was Executive Vice President–the #2–at SEIU 1199 in New York City.

After Gaspard was appointed to the White House, Carribbean Voice quoted him as saying, “I grew up in 1199…and I will always be an 1199er wherever I am.”  SEIU’s luxury is that now taxpayers are paying for it.

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