Census Bureau Severs Ties With ACORN – Fox Nation Victory!! - Updated

Check out this US House of Representatives staff report on ACORN and see for yourself:

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/11079244/Is-ACORN-Intentionally-Structured-as-a-Criminal-Enterprise

The Census Director has sent a letter to the National Headquarters of ACORN notifying the group that the Census Bureau is severing all ties with the community organizing group for all work having to do with the 2010 census.

"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," read a letter from Census Director Robert M. Groves to the president of ACORN. "Unfortunately, we no longer have confidence that our national partnership agreement is being effectively managed through your many local offices. For the reasons stated, we therefore have decided to terminate the partnership," the letter said.

"Unfortunately, we no longer have confidence that our national partnership agreement is being effectively managed through your many local offices. For the reasons stated, we therefore have decided to terminate the partnership," the letter said.

The news follows the firing Friday of two more ACORN employees after new hidden-camera footage showed workers for the group advising a couple posing as a pimp and prostitute how to subvert the law.

Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) reacted to the news Friday night, applauding the decision by the Census Bureau.

"ACORN had no business working on the Census. ACORN’s partisan election efforts and its involvement in criminal conduct rightly disqualified it from working on the non-partisan mission of the Census to accurately and honestly count the U.S. population," Rep. Issa said.

ACORN had previously been tapped to help with low level data gathering for the 2010 census. A copy of the director's letter has been sent to Congress and relevant committees, as well as ACORN.

Two more ACORN workers were fired Friday after a second video surfaced, this time showing staff members in the community organizers' Washington office offering to help the undercover man and woman acquire illegal home loans that would help them set up a brothel.

Those firings came less than 24 hours after another pair of ACORN officials, from the group's Baltimore office, were canned for instructing the "pimp" and "prostitute" how to falsify tax forms and seek illegal benefits for 13 "very young" girls from El Salvador that pair said they wanted to import to work as child prostitutes.

Both of the encounters were videotaped on a hidden camera wielded by 25-year-old independent filmmaker James O'Keefe, posing as the pimp — tapes that have ignited calls for investigations of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

The group's leaders said Friday they were "appalled and angry" at what their staffers had done, but insisted the videos were part of a political "smear" campaign and not representative of the institution as a whole.

"But that does not excuse the behavior of the employees," wrote ACORN's president Alton Bennet and executive director Mike Shea. "We have fired them and are initiating an internal review of practices and reminding all staff of their obligation to uphold the highest legal and ethical standards."

O'Keefe, the filmmaker who exposed ACORN's employees, was accompanied by 20-year-old Hannah Giles, who posed as a prostitute. On a videotape of their visit to ACORN's Washington's office, they are seen receiving guidance to establish the woman as the sole proprietor of a bogus company to mask the nature of her business.

"She's not going to put on (the loan application) that she's doing prostitution ... she doesn't have to," a now-fired ACORN staffer says. "You don't have to sit back and tell people what you do."

Related Stories:

• Video Shows ACORN Founder Wade Rathke Plotting America’s Downfall

Video Shows ACORN Founder Wade Rathke Plotting America's Downfall

On his TV show today, Glenn Beck spotlighted a fascinating interview that ACORNcracked.com editor Kyle Olson conducted with disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke.

Olson visited Rathke's book signing in New Orleans to get the footage. The book is Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families, in which Rathke serves up some community organizing war stories, and offers his thoughts on the future of organizing.

As I wrote here at the American Spectator, Rathke is a pioneer of the so-called welfare rights movement that aims to get Americans on welfare. He devotes an entire chapter of his book to what he calls "The 'Maximum Eligible Participation' Solution." It is a strategy for orchestrated crisis that savvy leftist groups across America are likely to embrace.

Rathke confirms in Olson's footage (during what appears to be a book talk) that he is pursuing this strategy that calls for all Americans eligible for welfare payments to pursue every penny the law "entitles" them to. He urges people to "make sure that other people in the community" are actually getting their due from the government.

The Maximum Eligible Participation Solution is just the old Cloward-Piven Strategy in new clothes. The strategy aimed at radical social and political change was articulated by Marxist university professors Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven in a 1966 Nation article, "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty." The two academics called for "a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls" in an effort to overwhelm the system. [Italics in original.]

Rathke writes in his book, "it is hard to believe that we cannot assemble the troops to mount a campaign for maximum eligible participation that harvests the opportunities and dollars already available if we could achieve full utilization of existing programs."

As I noted previously, Rathke has also said that technology should be utilized to make it as easy as possible for people to claim welfare benefits.

Here is the segment from today's "Glenn Beck Program":

Here is Olson's interview with Rathke:

By Matthew Vadum on 7.29.09 @ 8:23PM – American Spectator

Posted: Daily Thought Pad

Where There's Smoke, Is There Fire?

Here's the one thing: We're told that when there's smoke, there's fire; but is that really true?

There's a rotten smell coming from ACORN, the community organizing group of 400,000 or so people in 110 cities that became notorious for voter registration fraud allegations during the 2008 election.

We have people on the inside telling us what they believe is happening because there doesn't seem to be enough journalists who want to be the Woodward and Bernstein of today.

First hint of smoke: Here's what the chair of ACORN in Washington, D.C., said last week:

MARCEL REID, ACORN: ACORN doesn't need to be funded with any more taxpayer dollars until we find out what happened to the last taxpayer dollars that ACORN was funded with.

Boy, isn't it awfully suspicious that people within the organization itself can't seem to get answers about where all the taxpayer money is going? There's no transparency and when people have asked questions, they've been tossed out — like another one of our guests, Karen Inman.

We know there is smoke, but is there fire? I don't know because it's nearly impossible to unravel the web of organizations that are part of this massive group.

All of ACORN apparently operates under the umbrella of Citizens Consulting Inc., whose Web site is completely empty aside from its address: 1024 Elysian Fields Ave., New Orleans.

According to corporate filings, about 270 related organizations — which are a mix of corporations and non-profits from states from California to Louisiana — have filed from that location. Does that look like a building that holds 270 organizations?

The $630,000 building that was once a funeral home is owned by Elysian Fields corp.

But there's even more smoke there.

The president of ACORN, Wade Rathke, is also a partner in Elysian Fieldscorp. And he and his brother Dale are listed as president or partner in dozens of companies based in that building in Louisiana.

We've told you that Dale embezzled about a million dollars while serving as comptroller of CCI and was fired about a year ago over it — only after the scandal had been brushed under the carpet for about eight years.

But is there fire?

To give you an idea of what's going on at that address as far as size and scope, compare it to the United Way. The United Way has 1,300 local organizations, while ACORN has 1,200 — so they're roughly the same size. But, we found just 13 records of affiliated organizations at United Way's main address. ACORN has two hundred and seventy.

So what's going on in that location? We don't know yet. We think it could be as harmless as an administrative letter drop.

But there's plenty of smoke at that address in Louisiana and we're going to find out whether the fire department needs to be called in.

Is Beck right?

Related Resources:

Beck's Battle Royal With ACORN

See Video: All About the Money

See Video: Fired For Asking Questions


The Mighty Acorn