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.”

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.

Consequently, we fear that ACORN senior management has launched yet another scheme to exploit the gullibility of some low income workers and bilk American taxpayers out of thousands of dollars of government benefits.

But who controls the staff at ACORN? The national president (Maude Hurd)? The Executive Director (Steve Kest)? The answer is the Chief Organizer, or Bertha Lewis. Under ACORN by-laws the Chief Organizer (not the board of directors) is responsible for all of ACORN staff and employees. Lewis has control of the staff; but the board has to reign in Lewis (and others).

Bertha Lewis has previously announced that an advisory council would assist her in getting ACORN’s “house in order”. This advisory council includes John Podesta, head of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank; Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union; and former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. In our opinion, the first order of business should be to “clean house” entirely and remove all culpable leaders and managers, including Lewis.

This will never stop until the corrupt leadership and senior management are purged from the organization. These individuals have gotten away with doing wrong for so long; they appear incapable of doing anything the right way. Greg Hall of Truth To Power once described ACORN as an organization that can’t count to “one” when preparing voter registrations. Now they can’t fill out unemployment insurance forms either.

The ACORN 8 have always sought to reform – not destroy – ACORN. But as scandal after scandal continue to emerge; it is getting hard for die hard supporters, like the ACORN 8, to believe that ACORN will survive. And there simply is no way that ACORN can continue to exist under the control of incompetent or corrupt senior management and executive leadership.

With a long history of lawbreaking that is finally getting media attention, the poverty pimps of ACORN are currently in retreat across the nation, and an upcoming voter registration fraud trial may reveal embarrassing information that disrupts the operations of the embattled radical activist group. This is in addition to the undercover child prostitution sting videos revealed in recent days on this website.

The testimony will come soon from former ACORN Las Vegas field director Christopher Edwards. Charged with election fraud by Nevada’s Democratic attorney general, he cut a deal last month with prosecutors and has pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit the crime of compensation for registration of voters.

Sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 17.

ACORN stands accused of enforcing voter registration quotas with its employees and offering bonuses for extra registrations. Nevada law forbids the use of such incentives on the theory it encourages canvassers to file fraudulent registrations. No wonder: ACORN registers “Mickey Mouse” and various celebrities, out-of-state residents, and dead people, every election cycle.

As part of the plea deal, Edwards, whom state investigators consider to be the mastermind of the incentive program, has agreed to testify against former regional director, Amy Busefink, and against ACORN, which is a co-defendant. The Las Vegas Sun reported that Edwards acknowledged he conspired with Busefink and ACORN to create the “Blackjack” incentive program that gave canvassers an extra $5 for submitting 21 or more registration cards each day. The daily quota was allegedly 20 forms.

If ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) happens to be convicted, it could have its status as a nonprofit corporation revoked in Nevada, which could make it very difficult for the ACORN network to operate in that key battleground state.

Such a conviction would send shock waves through leftist organizing circles across the nation and might embolden more prosecutors to take on ACORN. Until it was charged by Nevada this year, ACORN had boasted about its ability to duck prosecution for election fraud.

Amy Schur, a senior ACORN official who has been in charge of the group’s national campaigns, is likely to testify in the Nevada case, said Karen Inman of St. Paul, Minnesota, a former member of ACORN’s national board.

Schur’s testimony might be devastating to ACORN because it provide a public airing of many of the group’s skeletons, suggested Inman, a lawyer by training.

That’s because Schur has intimate knowledge of how ACORN operates and was one member of a group within ACORN including then-chief organizer and founder Wade Rathke that covered up a nearly $1 million embezzlement by Rathke’s brother, Inman said. Wade Rathke was fired by the board last summer and ordered to sever all ties with ACORN. He has failed to do so. He is still, for example, chief organizer of SEIU Local 100 in New Orleans, an ACORN affiliate he founded.

Inman herself was ousted from the national board by management last fall after she asked too many questions about the embezzlement. Now she’s one of the leaders of the “ACORN 8,” a group of former ACORN members trying to reform ACORN.

Inman also made the point that ACORN is in turmoil throughout America.

Liz Wolf of Citizens Consulting Inc. (CCI), the shadowy financial nerve center of the ACORN network, has been negotiating with tax collectors on behalf of ACORN to have interest on its tax debts waived and to have some of the debts partially forgiven, Inman said.

CCI alone owes at least $400,000 in back taxes to the IRS, various states, and the District of Columbia. Collectively, the many affiliates within the ACORN network owe millions of dollars to tax authorities. The tax debts remain even after ACORN took a controversial payment from a developer in exchange for the group’s support for a sports stadium and mixed-use complex in Brooklyn. (The Pelican Institute recently unearthed $1 million in ACORN tax debts.)

Experts say the taxes owed are probably employment taxes, the same taxes used to support the Big Government programs that ACORN is so enamored of. Always resourceful, ACORN is using its massive tax liabilities to cry poor and beg funders for more money.

According to Inman, so far this year ACORN has closed many of its offices nationwide. Offices in Ohio (Dayton and Columbus), Michigan (Grand Rapids), and Texas have closed their doors. The offices in Oakland, California, and in her hometown of St. Paul are barely operating, she said.

“This is the first time in Minnesota that the office has gone dormant after an election,” she said.

ACORN is moving much of its operations out of its traditional headquarters in New Orleans to New York so executive director Steve Kest and chief organizer Bertha Lewis can exercise tighter control over the whole network, Inman explained.

Former ACORN employees are facing trial on election fraud charges in Pittsburgh, but those charges appear to be on hold now that the ACLU is challenging the constitutionality of Pennsylvania’s voter registration law. ACORN remains under investigation by the local Democratic prosecutor in Cleveland, Ohio, after a grand jury indicted a local man for voting illegally after being registered multiple times by ACORN. The Louisiana attorney general’s office is also investigating ACORN.

The Edwards plea bargain came the same week that CCI, the financial heart of the ACORN network, was accused of filing false lobbying disclosure reports with Congress. That revelation is important because, as former D.C. ACORN housing committee member Charles Turner said earlier this year, CCI “is where the shell game begins.”

“ACORN has over 200 different entities that the money gets moved around to – for this purpose to that purpose, this organization to that organization,” said Turner. “We believe the way the money has been moved around, they’ve been laundering money.”

Federal lawmakers have known for years about ACORN’s unorthodox practices including its use of government resources to promote legislation and its extensive commingling of funds within its network of affiliates.

Former ACORN officials say these activities are controlled by the mysterious CCI, which is located in ACORN’s headquarters in New Orleans. CCI handles the financial affairs of hundreds of affiliates within the ACORN network. ACORN member dues, government money, and foundation grants, are all sucked into the CCI vortex often never to be seen again.

This summer, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California), ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent an information request to the IRS about CCI, which he noted “simultaneously managed the accounts of political and private donor-funded organizations.”

In the letter, Issa asked if “CCI’s co-management of various tax-exempt and non-exempt affiliate accounts, many of which receive federal funds and some of which are 527s, violate[d]” the Internal Revenue Code. His follow-up question was, “If so, has the IRS taken steps to prevent CCI’s co-management of affiliate accounts that are legally required to be separate and segregated?”

Issa’s committee investigators released a report last month stating that ACORN “is a shell game played in 120 cities, 43 states and the District of Columbia through a complex structure designed to conceal illegal activities, to use taxpayer and tax-exempt dollars for partisan political purposes, and to distract investigators.”

The report examines the ACORN network’s abusive interlocking directorates, and claims that the group deliberately organized itself to escape legal and public scrutiny. “ACORN hides behind a paper wall of nonprofit corporate protections to conceal a criminal conspiracy on the part of its directors, to launder federal money in order to pursue a partisan political agenda and to manipulate the American electorate.”

There is “a pattern of loose financial accounting and no firewalls” within the community-based group’s byzantine network of hundreds of affiliated groups, Issa said.

Although the actions and possible outcomes explored in this article aren’t likely to end up killing ACORN outright, it’s clear that the group has already used up more than a few of its nine lives.

Even if allegations in the Issa report don’t lead to criminal charges, it’s worth noting that the nation’s largest community-based activist organization, which claims to defend the working class, has a record of visceral, abiding hostility to the very same pro-labor laws it claims to support.

Although it supports the continued imposition of equal employment opportunity laws on the rest of America, it argued it shouldn’t have to comply with those same laws. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had to sue ACORN in the 1990s to force it comply with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the crown jewel of the civil rights movement’s legislative accomplishments.

And for a group that poses as a champion of workers’ rights, ACORN doesn’t treat its own workers well. What follow below are just a few select examples from ACORN’s sordid history of employee abuse.

The Industrial Workers of the World complained that Wade Rathke’s SEIU Local 100 sabotaged a union drive by employing union-busting techniques used by corporate America. In 2003 the National Labor Relations Board determined ACORN had unlawfully blocked its workers from organizing.

Fed up with long hours and paltry pay, four ACORN organizers were canned by ACORN two days after they started a union certification drive against the group in Portland, Oregon. “We felt there was a lot of deceit in the organization,” organizer Sarah Manowitz told Williamette Week. Employees reportedly worked 54 hours per week, including Saturdays, for annual pay of just $20,200. Two organizers said they were often paid late.

In 2006, $250-a-week ACORN intern Sandra Stewart told Baltimore City Paper that the Baltimore chapter hadn’t bothered to pay her for her work. Three other former ACORN workers told the paper that the group failed to pay them back wages.

A 2003 study of ACORN by the Employment Policies Institute found the group paid a wage of $5.67 per hour, which was “less than half the level demanded by many proposed ‘living wage’ ordinances that ACORN supports.”

ACORN doesn’t like paying its employees overtime. In 1996 the federal Department of Labor sued Citizens Consulting Inc. (CCI), a shadowy ACORN affiliate that traditionally took care of administrative matters for ACORN. The next year a federal court ordered CCI to cough up $10,000 in back wages.

A 1995 court case offered a window it what ACORN thinks of itself.

ACORN sued the state of California seeking an exemption from the law that requires that it pay its own employees a minimum wage. The group treated its workers as if they were mendicant friars, arguing that keeping its employees in poverty helps to boost their zeal to help the poor.

“We have employees who come to work for us because they’re politically committed to the things we’re doing,” Steve Kest, ACORN’s executive director, said in 1996. “They do their work, then [as volunteers] they do similar work, sometimes late into the night.”

ACORN lost.