So the organized crime syndicate is trying to shake down the financial services companies that handle those international money transfers.

In Canada, the local arm of ACORN is trying to shake down Money Mart and Western Union. ACORN, which used to employ President Obama, is hitting these two companies because it wants them to pay it protection money. The corporate shakedown is just one of the dubious methods ACORN uses to victimize businesses.

ACORN Canada’s new president Kay Bisnath complains the fees banks and other companies charge for money transfers are “exorbitant.” Ostensibly to help poor people, ACORN is demanding that Western Union charge no more than 5 percent for overseas remittances.

Canada’s biggest daily newspaper, the Toronto Star, which is left-wing even by Canadian standards, is helping ACORN’s Canadian affiliate by providing political propaganda disguised as news. (Canada’s taxpayer-funded TV network, CBC, is also doing its bit to promote ACORN.) The Red Star, as some Canadian conservatives half-jokingly call it, is home to America-hating socialist writers such as Thomas Walkom and Linda McQuaig.

The pairing actually makes a lot sense. Both the Star and ACORN are on the far left and both have an impressive record of union-busting.

In the latest in a series of pro-ACORN puff pieces, the Star’s immigration reporter, Nicholas Keung, wrote a feature article that used Rassel Mohammad, a Bangladeshi immigrant to Canada, as a prop.

When every three months he visits the Western Union counter at the local Money Mart Mohammad “pays a hefty price to help out his two widowed aunts and six school-age cousins in Bangladesh,” Keung writes. Mohammad has to pay a supposedly outrageous $11 fee to ensure $100 makes its way safely to his relatives in his native country.

But is 11 percent really too much to pay to transfer funds to Bangladesh? There are plenty of reasons why a company might feel it necessary to charge an $11 fee for a money transfer to that troubled developing country.

With close to 159 million people packed into an area smaller than Iowa, 40 percent of Bangladesh’s population lives below the poverty line. Residents are at high risk of contracting food or waterborne diseases such as hepatitis A and E, and typhoid fever. They are also at high risk for dengue fever, malaria, and leptospirosis.

A third of the country floods every year during monsoon season. Bangladesh is plagued by political instability, poor infrastructure, corruption, and inadequate power supplies.

Operating a business under such adverse conditions can’t be easy or cheap.

ACORN isn’t pushing for a 5 percent cap on remittance service charges in Canada and other countries to help people. People like Mohammad are merely pawns that ACORN uses to advance its radical political objectives.

The real goal is to extort funds from deep-pocketed corporations. ACORN then uses the ill-gotten gains to fund its subversive political operations.

ACORN doesn’t give a farthing’s cuss about Mohammad or any poor people. Ever since its founding in 1970 the group’s goal has been to overthrow capitalism. As its mission statement, which is essentially a Communist Manifesto for community organizers, says, “We will continue our fight … until we have shared the wealth.”

Ironically, ACORN founder Wade Rathke, who runs the group’s international operations, calls the remittance fees charged by financial institutions “an exploitive cash cow.”

And he ought to know: Rathke himself is a master of exploitation.

Rathke was fired by ACORN in 2008 for gross misconduct. When his brother Dale, ACORN’s chief financial officer, stole close to a million dollars in 2000, Rathke engineered a cover-up that was only discovered eight years later.

Rathke kept his light-fingered brother on ACORN’s payroll the whole time and cooked the books to conceal the theft, as I explain in my new book, Subversion Inc: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

Under Rathke’s leadership, ACORN engaged in union-busting and sued to be exempted from minimum wage laws and equal employment opportunity laws.

While Rathke was at the helm, ACORN organizers were paid $18,000 a year for 54-hour weeks. Though ACORN says all workers have a “fundamental right” to workplace safety,   it routinely sent employees to work alone evenings in dangerous neighborhoods. Some female ACORN workers were sexually assaulted as a result.

But I digress.

The Toronto Star article gets to the point when it notes that ACORN “is targeting Western Union first because of its large share — 17 per cent — of the global cross-border remittance market.”

Cha-ching!

And if ACORN’s targets don’t cough up the dough, intimidation and violence will follow.

Here’s what ACORN did to another financial services firm based in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Liberty Tax Service was targeted by ACORN in 2005. More than 100 angry ACORN members showed up at the company’s headquarters.

ACORN accused the company of charging excessive interest rates on refund anticipation loans for income tax filers. “All of sudden, four bus loads of homeless people pull up in front of our headquarters here in Virginia Beach,” CEO John Hewitt said.

“They came pouring into the building like a Mongolian horde. There was screaming and fighting. One employee was bitten and another was scratched. They both had to go to the emergency room.”

The company agreed to pay ACORN $50,000 a year. “To me, it’s just to stop them from harassing us,” said Hewitt. “Even though I felt dirty by paying them money, I said, you know, it’s a business decision.”

Liberty Tax Service is just one of ACORN’s many victims in the United States.

Now that ACORN has offices in Canada’s national capital of Ottawa and the major cities Toronto, Hamilton, and Vancouver, expect the group’s victims to start piling up north of the border.

ACORN also operates in Mexico, Honduras, Peru, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Czech Republic, Kenya, India, and South Korea.

* * * * *

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 my book Subversion Inc. at Amazon and in Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million bookstores. Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.

The campaign that COI is most involved in, or at least featured on their main page, is the campaign to reform global remittance. Global remittance is the process by which ex patriates send money back to family in their home country. For instance, it’s been well documented that Mexico’s main economic source is actually money sent back home from the USA. According to Rathke, this is an industry that topped $300 billion, and far too many of its players practice predatory lending practices. For instance, Rathke has seen fees up to 20% of the amount to be wired. So, if someone were to send $1000 back home, they would be charged $200 to process this transaction. Rathke stressed that such fees were an “outlier” but fees of 5% are about the norm. In his view, this is far too much, and the poor are being taken advantage of by predatory lending practices in this area. Furthermore, with these rates, it also leads to a black market. That’s what’s happening. Often people send money home with all sorts of strangers because they’re promised that it will get there with no charge.

Furthermore, fees to countries in Africa are often significantly higher than to Mexico and other parts of the world. Rathke told me that he hasn’t seen any evidence that it actually costs Western Union any more to wire money to Africa than it does anywhere else. So, the fees should be the same. Rathke would like to “open a dialogue” with Western Union, Moneygram, as well as several of the largest multi national banks to speak about fees charged for remittance. In fact, Rathke believes that multi national banks like Citigroup could get involved in remittance and not only bring about much needed competition which would bring prices down, but also add another source of income for these banks.

For now, Rathke would merely like to sit at the negotiating table with representatives of Western Union et al. He told me that he didn’t have a percentage in mind. He was hoping to get an idea of how much it costs these organizations to process these transactions and then negotiate a “fair rate”. One individual I spoke with called Rathke a “master negotiator” and so that’s probably a place he’d be comfortable at.

I pointed out that major banks and wire transfer institutions like Western Union aren’t likely to sit down at the negotiating table with Wade Rathke just because he asked nicely. I also told him that I believed that he wouldn’t give up just because the other side wasn’t willing to negotiate when asked nicely. So, how far would he take his protests and how cut-throat would he be in dealing with these banks and transfer institutions? I asked if he was willing to picket outside of these places. Rathke laughed and he told me that he didn’t think that pickets and protests were “cut-throat” and that “if an institution is predatory in their remittance charges you bet we’ll let their customers know it”. Rathke told me that at this stage COI only wants to represent those folks looking to use remittance services and isn’t looking to be a vendor because among other reasons they don’t have the infrastructure for such a venture.

COI is also working on a campaign in India to raise the profile of the issue of Wal-Mart’s entry into India. In India, internal laws don’t allow for retailers from outside the country. So, that bars WalMart from entering the country. Still, Rathke says that it’s inevitable that WalMart will find its way into India in the next five to ten years. He said that in their society there are all sorts of unintended consequences with bringing WalMart in. Currently, retail in India is done mostly by street vendors and the equivalent of our mom and pop thrift stores. Having a big box top store come in and swallow up neighborhoods can create all sorts of adverse effects on such a society. As such, COI is campaigning to have the government in India study and plan for WalMart’s inevitable entry into their market. Rathke has a long history with Walmart. Several years ago, he campaigned for a living wage and health insurance for Walmart employees. When, in 2006, a Walmart employee was left for dead because they were very sick and without insurance, the publicity that Rathke created from this story caused Walmart to relent and begin to provide health insurance to some employees and they cut their generic prescription prices to $4.

The one impression I got of Rathke is his pleasant demeanor. If the pressure and stress of the controversy surrounding ACORN has gotten to him, he certainly didn’t express it outwardly. Several folks told me that to be a good organizer you have to have a pleasant demeanor. I next turned to some questions about ACORN itself and it was at this point that the interview, which was almost exclusively pleasant, became contentious. I asked him what he had learned from his experience at ACORN and how he would try to apply that to COI. He was coy as though he didn’t understand what I was asking though I believe he did. He told me the structure of ACORN is different than the structure of COI. ACORN, according to Rathke, was one corporation while COI was a federation. In that, COI is currently in seven different countries. Yet, each country is its own separate entity. Meanwhile, all of ACORN’s affiliates, according to Rathke, were all part of the same organization. Yet, I pointed out, Rathke was in control of the entire federation.

I said that a cynic would believe that the bank accounts of ACORN Dominican Republic and ACORN Canada (each individual country in COI still uses the ACORN name) would eventually be comingled. Rathke responded that international banking laws would never allow such things. I responded that there were all sorts US laws that were broken by ACORN. At this point, Rathke lost his pleasant demeanor. He told me that ACORN broke NO laws. In his 39 years at the helm, they were audited each and every year and passed each and every time. He told me that I was talking to Wade Rathke and not some right wing ideologue.

There are several points of interest in this exchange. First, if Rathke sits at the top of this “federation”, it’s still unclear to me how each is separate. Without knowing who controls each bank account, it’s still not clear that funds can’t be comingled. Second, and much more importantly, ACORN always claimed that affiliates were separate of each other. Here, Rathke told me what many that want ACORN reformed have suggested, if not accused. That’s that ACORN and its affiliates aren’t separate but all part of the same organization, ACORN itself. What Rathke told me about ACORN’s structure is exactly the same as what many critics of ACORN have accused the group of doing.

I also asked him about the firing of Beth Butler. Butler is Rathke’s common law wife and she was, until recently, the long time head of Louisiana’s branch of ACORN. Rathke thought that it was inexplicable that at this point of turmoil that the hierarchy would fire Butler. The move only added chaos at a time when the organization was already in turmoil. He couldn’t explain it, understand it, or in any way see how it helped ACORN. I asked him what he thought of Steve Bradbury taking over for Butler. The back story here is that Bradbury could be considered a protege of Rathke. He certainly taught Bradbury a lot and Rathke had befriended Bradbury and groomed him for years. By taking over for Butler, this could be viewed as a betrayal. I said none of this, and Rathke was diplomatic. He told me that he read in a newspaper that Bradbury said this move was temporary and Rathke was taking him at his word.

Finally, I asked Rathke about his legacy. Did he think about his legacy? “Mike, I’ve been doing this for forty years, of course I think about my legacy”. He believes his legacy still has several chapters left. In that way, he looks forward. At the same time, he told me that no one is a “bigger fan of ACORN” than Rathke and that he’s saddened to watch them disintegrate so badly. He certainly understood that this disintegration did no favors to his legacy. Several people told me that as much as Alinsky has become an adjective and a verb, that one day Rathke would be synonymous with a style of organizing. With no hint of modesty, Rathke agreed.

Epilogue:

I didn’t ask Wade Rathke about his brother’s embezzlement. When things became contentious, I cut it off and moved on. I did this for several reasons. First, I asked Wade Rathke if he had time to talk about his campaign about remittance. I could have blind sided him with all sorts of gotcha questions about his brother and other alleged ACORN misdeeds. I don’t think that Rathke would have made any stunning admissions to me and of course, that’s not what we agreed on. The week previous to the interview, I wrote about the firing of Beth Butler and I said that moving forward Wade Rathke is the story. That’s the case. What has happened, the embezzlement, the investigations, and the disintegration, is not the story. Wade Rathke is the story, and what he’s going to do going forward is the story. All the other things have been hyperanalyzed, and there’s nothing I could have added to the discussion.

Wade Rathke is trying to do in the world what he did in the US. That is to grow a community to serve the poor and middle class throughout the world. People from all sides of the philosophical and ideological aisle will fill in the blanks on that statement. Ultimately, that chapter has only begun. It is the story now, and that’s why I wanted the interview. What happened in the past isn’t nearly as interesting as what Rathke wants to do in the future.