Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a longtime admirer of community organizing guru Saul Alinsky, visited the European Parliament in Brussels on March 6, 2009. She told the assembled Eurocrats:
I’m actually excited by this opportunity. I’m very well aware that we are not yet through this economic crisis but the chief of staff for President Obama is an old friend of mine and my husband’s and was in the White House when Bill was there. And he said, you know, never waste a good crisis, and when it comes to the economic crisis don’t waste it when it can have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security. And that’s what we’re trying to do.
This makes it even more clear that the Obama administration’s highest priority is the radical transformation of American society. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s statement after Election Day (“Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things.”) wasn’t just an offhanded remark.
The economic crisis is simply an excuse to transmogrify American into a sclerotic European-style socialist state. The economically suicidal cap-and-trade legislation, which would have the effect of a huge national energy tax, is a primary vehicle to impose the left’s vision of “social justice” on America.
Who knew the Obama administration was being so blatant about it? They’re not even trying to hide it and the media, for the most part, isn’t even bothering to ask questions.
Here is a video of Secretary Clinton’s remarks in Brussels:
I have learned that after testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on March 19, Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA) Vice President Heather Heidelbaugh today responded to a request for additional information about ACORN from Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), a member of the committee. (letter available here as PDF)
Heidelbaugh had testified at the hearing about ACORN’s many misdeeds. At the time, committee chairman John Conyers (D-Michigan) said the allegations were “a pretty serious matter” and that an investigation was warranted. Heidelbaugh’s testimony about ACORN was largely based on evidence provided by ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief in her testimony in a 2008 Pennsylvania lawsuit called Moyer v. Cortes. (331-page transcript available here as PDF)
Heidelbaugh had testified in Congress that the nonprofit group violated a host of tax, campaign finance, and other laws. She said the presidential campaign of Barack Obama sent ACORN its “maxed out donor list” and asked two of the avowedly nonpartisan group’s employees “to reach out to the maxed out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN.” The New York Times had the donor list story but editors there spiked it the month before the election, she said, repeating the assertion on “The O’Reilly Factor” two weeks later.
Here are the two questions posed by Lee and the short versions of the answers from Heidelbaugh (as provided in an RNLA press release available here):
Q. Do you think ACORN staff was simply untrained and that there was no systematic attempt by ACORN to engage in voter fraud?
A. Based on the evidence I have seen, my opinion is that the ACORN staff were not adequately trained to conduct proper voter registration drives. Further, I question whether the system of compensation in place for the staff obtaining voter registration cards both for the worker and for ACORN encouraged voter registration fraud. It is also my opinion based on the evidence that I have seen that it was not a simple matter of poor training. Lastly, it is my opinion based on the evidence I have seen from the King County Settlement Agreement, the testimony in the Pennsylvania case, and the news reports from other criminal investigations that ACORN as an organization has either willfully failed to properly train its workers or grossly negligently failed to train its workers. Further information is needed in order to determine which is closer to the actual scenario. In addition, since ACORN operated voter registration drives in so many states, each state or local operation may differ in its training efforts.
Q. Do the workers with ACORN get paid based upon how many registrations they complete?
A. There have been widespread allegations from former ACORN employees that ACORN does pay its employees on a per registration basis and has imposed a quota system upon its employees. These allegations have been raised in states including Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington. These allegations have been the basis of charges brought against ACORN representatives in the state of Nevada.
If you wish to read Heidelbaugh’s complete answers to Rep. Lee, they are available here as a PDF.
On May 4 Conyers mysteriously backed away from plans for a probe the same week a raft of new voter registration fraud charges were laid against ACORN and its ex-employees in Nevada and Pennsylvania. Last week Conyers cryptically remarked that he wasn’t going to proceed with an investigation because “the powers that be decided against it.” He refused to elaborate.
Incidentally, the chairman of the RNLA, David Norcross, was on the “Glenn Beck Program” last night talking about ACORN, the Secretary of State Project, and their role in electing Al Franken, the incoming second Democratic senator representing Minnesota. Here is the video clip:
Note: On July 3, I obtained the above referenced Jackson Lee letter dated June 17 and added a link to it above.
Remember when the Obama administration lied about the extent of ACORN’s involvement in the 2010 Census?
After the Census Bureau responded to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, Judicial Watch reported that
In its official statement responding to the ACORN controversy, the Obama Commerce Department downplayed ACORN’s participation in the Census, and labeled “baseless” the notion that ACORN would be involved in any Census count. However, the Census Bureau offered ACORN the opportunity to “recruit Census workers” who would participate in the count. Moreover, as an “executive level” partner, ACORN has the ability to “organize and/or serve as a member on a Complete Count Committee,” which, according to Census documents, helps “develop and implement locally based outreach and recruitment campaigns.”
According to its application ACORN also signed up to: “Encourage employees and constituents to complete and mail their questionnaire; identify job candidates and/or distribute and display recruiting materials; appoint a liaison to work with the Census Bureau; provide space for Be Counted sites and/or Questionnaire Assistance Centers; sponsor community events to promote participation in the 2010 Census,” among 18 requested areas of responsibility. The documents also show the decision to add ACORN as a partner occurred in February, long after the January 15th Census partnership application deadline. (One Census official had bet “it was under Bush.”)
Now today the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the layoff of Census workers comprised the bulk of the jobs just lost in the federal government. The July 2 Employment Situation Summary states: “Employment in federal government fell by 49,000 in June, largely due to the layoff of workers temporarily hired to prepare for Census 2010.”
What’s wrong with this picture? The federal government isn’t exactly on an austerity binge right now.
Given that the Obama administration lied about ACORN’s involvement in the Census, it might be lying now about the laid off workers being temporary employees. Is the way being cleared for ACORN workers to be hired?
If the administration hadn’t tried a few months ago to move oversight of the Census into the White House and then lied about ACORN and the Census, the news of the layoffs would not have caught my attention.
However, the Obama administration did attempt the Census power play and it did lie about ACORN’s involvement in the Census, so reasonable observers have every reason to be suspicious.
And former ACORN organizer Gregory Hall recently warned in a Washington Examiner op-ed about the dangers of letting ACORN participate in the Census:
There is no reason to believe the problems of staff mistreatment or systematic fraud will be any different if and when the federal government asks ACORN to take its show on the road to households across the country.
Back in January 1973, National Lampoon sported a brilliant cover – probably the satirical magazine’s most famous.
A cute black and white dog was the visual element, staring ominously at a revolver pointing at his head. The headline read: “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog.”
People bought the magazine in droves, not because they believed the editors of National Lampoon were really going to kill the dog, but because it was so funny.
It strikes me that Barack Obama and the Democrat-dominated Congress are governing along the same lines. The only difference? They’re not joking.
Instead of putting guns to the heads of dogs, they are manufacturing crises they claim will result in the imminent destruction of the world as we know it and demanding we buy their solution or else.
It’s an old trick really. If not invented a few years before that National Lampoon cover, it was actually codified by a Marxist Columbia University professor and his research assistant in an article in The Nation May 2, 1966. The professor of social work was Richard A. Cloward, and his research assistant was Frances Fox Piven. What they authored became known as “the Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis.”
Cloward and Piven specifically calculated their strategy as a way to end poverty by bringing the capitalist system to collapse through a series of escalating demands that could never be met.
One of their principal demands was the establishment of a “guaranteed annual income.” Just six years later, this demand became a part of the platform of the 1972 Democratic National Convention and the presidential nominee that year, George McGovern. [...]
Today, Obama is still employing the Cloward-Piven strategy, but not as a community organizer. Today he is the Community Organizer in Chief.
He’s still creating crises as a means of empowerment.
Think about it: With Obama, everything is a crisis – carbon dioxide levels, the banking industry, the automobile industry, the health care system and especially the economy.
As ACORN targeted four financial companies in 14 cities Tuesday, ACORN official Austin King and I had a spirited mini-debate on Fox News about the nation’s foreclosure crisis. (video here)
King, who organized the protests, argued that ACORN had warned policy makers years ago about the approaching meltdown.
Even if this is true, it misses the point because ACORN helped to create the housing bubble that popped leading to the mortgage industry’s meltdown.
For years ACORN has supported the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), a kind of financial affirmative action program that required banks to lend to borrowers in supposedly under-served neighborhoods. CRA helped to change the way U.S. financial institutions operated. Even though it didn’t cover all mortgages, the law opened the door for community organizers to weaken lending standards.
Banks have to be evaluated and given CRA report cards that are drawn up by government examiners. The law had nebulous criteria originally but this changed when the Clinton administration promulgated a 1995 regulation requiring those assessing a bank’s CRA compliance to seek out the opinions of housing and consumer advocates.
Enter ACORN.
This regulatory change allowed the community organizers of ACORN to pressure banks to lend money to their constituencies whether they were creditworthy or not. Instead of taking a principled stance banks caved in and wrote loans they shouldn’t have while paying out millions of dollars in protection money to ACORN as the cost of doing business.
Around the same time that banks began to ramp up their risky subprime lending, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, under intense political pressure to service the subprime market, created a new investment vehicle in the secondary market known as the mortgage-backed security (MBS). Banks were less choosy about borrowers because they knew they could offload their risky loans on MBS investors.
So, ACORN helped to cause the mortgage bubble by strongarming banks into making loans they shouldn’t have. And cheering them on was ACORN’s lawyer, Barack Obama, who contributed to the increasingly hostile environment for banks when he represented plaintiffs in the 1995 class action lawsuit Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank. The suit demanded that Citibank grant mortgages to an equal percentage of minority and non-minority mortgage applicants. The bank settled the case three years later and reportedly agreed to beef up its lending to unqualified applicants.
ACORN refuses to acknowledge the role that it and the CRA played in the current crisis on Wall Street, and now President Obama supports stronger enforcement of the disastrous law.
That’s ACORN’s involvement in the subprime mortgage crisis in a nutshell.
After the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously rejected his lawsuit today, Republican Norm Coleman graciously conceded the bitterly disputed contest over the second U.S. Senate seat for Minnesota.
None of this changes the fact that as a senator Al Franken is not legitimate. The election was stolen at the precinct level, during the recount, and during the post-election litigation.
As ACORN-aligned Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a former community organizer, presided over the vote-counting process, Coleman’s original lead dwindled. The morning after the election, Coleman led Franken by 725 votes. Over the next five days, Coleman’s lead had dwindled to just 221. Election officials claimed they had to correct typos on vote tally sheets and that these corrections gave Franken 435 votes and took 69 away from Coleman.
There were mountains of other irregularities which I’m not going to bother detailing here and somehow in the end Franken came out on top.
Ritchie was elected Minnesota secretary of state in part because of outside help. He defeated two-term incumbent Republican Mary Kiffmeyer in 2006 after receiving an endorsement and financial assistance for his run from a below-the-radar non-federal “527″ group called the Secretary of State Project. The entity can accept unlimited financial contributions and doesn’t have to disclose them publicly until well after the election.
The founders of the Secretary of State Project, which claims to advance “election protection” but only backs Democrats, religiously believe that right-leaning secretaries of state helped the GOP steal the presidential elections in Florida in 2000 (Katherine Harris) and in Ohio in 2004 (Ken Blackwell).
The secretary of state candidates the group endorses sing the same familiar song about electoral integrity issues: Voter fraud is largely a myth, vote suppression is used widely by Republicans, cleansing the dead and fictional characters from voter rolls should be avoided until embarrassing media reports emerge, and anyone who demands that a voter produce photo identification before pulling the lever is a racist, democracy-hating Fascist.
In 2006, the Minnesota ACORN Political Action Committee endorsed Ritchie and donated to his campaign. According to the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board, contributors to Ritchie’s campaign included liberal philanthropists George Soros, Drummond Pike, and Deborah Rappaport, along with veteran community organizer Heather Booth, a Saul Alinsky disciple who co-founded the Midwest Academy, a radical ACORN clone. One article on Ritchie’s 2006 campaign website bragged about the fine work ACORN did in Florida to pass a constitutional amendment to raise that state’s minimum wage.
It was revealed during a panel discussion at the Democratic Party’s convention in Denver last summer that the Democracy Alliance, a financial clearinghouse created by Soros and insurance magnate Peter B. Lewis, approved the Secretary of State Project as a grantee. The Democracy Alliance aspires to create a permanent political infrastructure of nonprofits, think tanks, media outlets, leadership schools, and activist groups-a kind of “vast left-wing conspiracy” to compete with the conservative movement. It has brokered more than $100 million in grants to liberal nonprofits including ACORN. The aforementioned Pike and Rappaport, who gave money to Ritchie’s campaign, are members of the Democracy Alliance.
According to IRS 8872 disclosure forms, the Secretary of State Project received donations from Democracy Alliance members including Soros, Rob Stein, Gail Furman, and Susie Tompkins Buell.
Meanwhile, for conservatives, it hardly needs to be pointed out that this Frankenstein is a fundamentally unserious and untested figure worthy of ridicule. After being isolated in the echo chamber of the entertainment-media-academia complex where he got nothing but praise for decades, Franken is quite unsuited for the world outside. He cannot tolerate criticism and characteristically responds to it with over-the-top vitriolic attacks. He is the living embodiment of all the horrible things that conservatives fairly or unfairly impute to DailyKos bloggers.
A professional comedian originally, Al Franken remains a joke.
Here is the video clip from my appearance today on the Fox News show “Your World with Neil Cavuto” (substitute host Alexis Glick) in which I debated ACORN official Austin King about the foreclosure crisis:
An Allegheny County, Pennsylvania judge urged prosecutors to “go after ACORN,” the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports:
A district judge who held another ACORN worker for trial Monday on election law violations urged prosecutors to go after the real culprit, the organization that employed him.
“Somebody has to go after ACORN,” Senior District Judge Richard H. Zoller said about the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
“It’s happening all over the country. All you have to do is turn on the television,” he said, referring to voter registration fraud charges brought recently against ACORN and its workers in Nevada.
“We will,” Allegheny County Detective Robert F. Keenan promised as he wrapped up his testimony.
A spokesman for District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. said following the hearing that the county’s investigation into members of ACORN and their activities during the 2008 campaign “remains open and active.”
“(T)here is quite a bit of activity aimed at determining if anyone else should be charged,” Zappala’s spokesman Mike Manko said.
Eric E. Jordan, 20, of North Braddock became the sixth person ordered to face trial in Allegheny County. He is charged with soliciting a voter registration and interfering with county voter registration officials by submitted applications for himself in order to meet his quota for registrations. A seventh defendant faces a preliminary hearing next month. [...]
ACORN, which played a starring role in creating the subprime mortgage crisis, plans to add insult to injury by harassing lenders across the nation with protests tomorrow in an effort to coerce them into supporting President Obama’s Making Home Affordable foreclosure-avoidance program.
Austin King, director of ACORN Financial Justice, sent out a press release today advising of the demonstrations that are planned as part of its “Homewrecker 4″ campaign. The four financial companies targeted are Goldman Sachs, HomEq Servicing, American Home Mortgage, and OneWest. Read the whole document here.
ACORN plans to hit Dallas, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, St. Louis, New York City, Wilmington (Del.), Columbus (Ohio), Houston, Little Rock, Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, and Seattle.
But let’s not forget that ACORN helped to cause the mortgage bubble by strongarming banks into making loans they shouldn’t have. And cheering them on was ACORN’s lawyer, Barack Obama, who contributed to the increasingly hostile environment for banks when he represented plaintiffs in the 1995 class action lawsuit Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank. The suit demanded that Citibank grant mortgages to an equal percentage of minority and non-minority mortgage applicants. The bank settled the case three years later and reportedly agreed to beef up its lending to unqualified applicants.
ACORN refuses to acknowledge the role that it and the CRA played in the current crisis on Wall Street, and President Obama continues to support stronger enforcement of the disastrous law.
The final paragraph of the press release is unintentionally hilarious:
Because millions of Americans are losing their homes, neighborhoods and the economy are in ruins, and while the “Home Wrecker 4” are taking tax dollars and giving away huge bonuses, they refuse to do even the bare minimum for American homeowners by signing up for the Obama foreclosure plan.
Millions of Americans are losing their homes and neighborhoods and the economy are in ruins because of groups like ACORN that interfere with markets and force banks to do stupid things.
And ACORN too has taken in millions of dollars in taxpayer funding and is utterly unaccountable. The group even covered up a million dollar embezzlement for eight years.
As I’ve said before, ACORN lies, lies, and then lies so more. No lie is too big or outrageous for the criminal group now charged in Nevada with voter registration fraud.
Blogger Nancy Armstrong (MsPlacedDemocrat.com) reports that St. Louis, Missouri, gave a $100,000 grant to ACORN and that $82,000 of it is unaccounted for.
The money was given to ACORN for loan modifications, that is, to help struggling homeowners refinance their mortgages. ACORN reportedly charges $750 for each loan modified and says it has completed 24 of them, which means it is entitled to $18,000 from the grant.
The Sunday Washington Times ran my op-ed about House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers’s (D-Michigan) decision to drop plans for a probe of ACORN.
Here is the top of it:
Who told House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Michigan Democrat, to lay off the radical activist group ACORN?
The 23-term congressman, who has been enamored of the aggressively partisan group for years, gave a truly odd explanation last week when he reaffirmed a May 4 statement that a probe of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) “appears unwarranted at this time.”
“The powers that be decided against it,” he said Wednesday, refusing to elaborate. His spokesman Jonathan Godfrey later said Mr. Conyers was referring to himself as “the powers that be.” Unless you believe that “the powers that be” is a novel variation of the editorial “we,” it’s clear Mr. Conyers wasn’t referring to himself and that somebody “got” to him. [...]
For space reasons I took out a reference to the fact that on Friday I sought a fresh quote from Conyers spokesman Jonathan Godfrey. He declined to provide one citing the fact that he had already provided his explanation to the Washington Times earlier in the week.
It appears the U.S. government can’t even spell health correctly, as shown in the below screen grab from government propaganda website HealthReform.gov. (”The Heallth Care Status Quo: Why America Needs Health Reform”)
Should you trust the government to properly manage something it –with literally trillions of dollars at its disposal to hire writers and editors– can’t even spell right?
There’s a nasty hail storm over Washington, D.C. right now.
Could it be a sign from above that the cap and trade bill that just barely passed the House (219 to 212) is a terrible idea?
Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity suggests the fact that the vote was so close is significant given the Democrats’ overwhelming majority in the House:
While cap-and-trade passed the House, it’s a testament to the power of free market activists that it was a difficult, down-to-the-wire, tough fight. This bill, Speaker Pelosi’s top priority, was supposed to sail through. Instead it crawled through and barely made it past the finish line in the House—and it took all the efforts of the White House to do it when the bill stalled a couple of days ago.
The bipartisan opposition to this bill shows just how broadly it will negatively impact the country. While some members’ votes were won with backroom deals and special interest carve outs it is instructive to see that some commonsense Democrats crossed the aisle to vote with most Republicans, and they deserve our thanks. On the other hand, we are committed to holding the members of Congress who sided with Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi instead off hard-working taxpayers accountable.
Cap-and-trade is a massive new tax on American families and American businesses. It’s especially crazy to pass such a huge new tax burden at a time when many families already face economic hardship.
Fortunately, we have always believed the place to kill this bill is the U.S. Senate. We will do everything we can to educate the public about the danger that this legislation poses for their family budgets and their economic freedom to help the voices of millions of grassroots activists be heard on this issue.
If the American people understand what this bill does, it will die in the Senate.
The economy-destroying cap-and-trade bill, which would impose a massive, regressive energy tax on Americans, is going to be voted on by the House of Representatives soon.
Visions of dollar signs are dancing in the heads of Al Gore, Goldman Sachs, and General Electric right now as they prepare to enrich themselves at the expense of the public interest.
It is a travesty. It is insanity. It will kill countless American jobs and help the federal government run every aspect of Americans’ lives. Anyone who sells carbon permits (assuming those provisions are still in the bill) under it should be sued for fraud.
It seems fitting that Edie Falco, who played a mobster’s wife on HBO’s “The Sopranos,” spoke at a rally in the nation’s capital organized by the racketeers at ACORN.
ACORN leads the Axelrod-style astroturf group known as Health Care for America Now, which organized the rally.
Meanwhile, the Kansas City Star reports that Missouri settled a voter registration lawsuit by agreeing to pay ACORN $450,000 in legal expenses.
“The lawsuit has led to a 2,000 percent increase in the number of people registering to vote at Missouri public assistance agencies,” said legal team spokesman Jon Greenbaum. “We appreciate that since they’ve been under court order, Missouri’s Department of Social Services has been a national model in showing how to implement this law.”
It was unclear at press time what percentage of the newly registered voters were dead people and cartoon characters.
In a rare moment of candor, President Obama explained to an audience how government-run healthcare would work in America.
According to the Los Angeles Times:
President Obama suggested at a town hall event Wednesday night that one way to shave medical costs is to stop expensive and ultimately futile procedures performed on people who are about to die and don’t stand to gain from the extra care.
In a nationally televised event at the White House, Obama said families need better information so they don’t unthinkingly approve “additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care.”
He added: “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.”
Obama said he has personal familiarity with such a dilemma. His grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given less than nine months to live, he said.
She fell and broke her hip, “and the question was, does she get hip replacement surgery, even though she was fragile enough they were not sure how long she would last?” [...]
So, old people: screw you. In the future Uncle Sam will put you on an ice floe and let you float away to your heavenly reward. It gives new meaning to the Latin phrase “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” (In English, How sweet and glorious it is to die for one’s country.)
Medical decisions should be made by patients, their families, and their doctors, not by government bureaucrats, but that’s ObamaCare for you.
And lies issue from his mouth — or in this case, from his computer keyboard.
Wade Rathke responds on his blog to the news reports about ACORN International changing its name.
“I’m just an organizer of lower income families around and not someone on either side of the fence with an axe to grind,” writes Rathke who participated in an eight-year coverup of his brother’s nearly $1 million embezzlement from ACORN.
So now he’s being victimized?
He also says in a roundabout way that he resigned from ACORN. Not true. He was dismissed, as shown in the ACORN national board minutes of June 20, 2008. (See pages 10 and 11 in linked document.)
If you had to pick one lawmaker to blame for the subprime mortgage bubble and subsequent collapse, that person would have to be House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) who is probably more culpable for the state of the economy right now even than Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut).
Frank has long pimped the disastrous Community Reinvestment Act and been a loyal friend of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Even as the economy went south last year, Frank stood by the CRA and the two government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). The CRA mandated irresponsible mortgage lending and then Fannie and Freddie, under intense pressure from Congress, bought up those doomed mortgages, bundled them together, and found suckers around the world to buy their mortgage junk bonds.
Yet the shameless, inveterate liar now has the audacity to demand that the monumentally reckless Fannie and Freddie lower mortgage underwriting standards for condominiums.
As Doug Bandow puts it:
[A]fter wasting billions in taxpayer dollars to inflate and thus wreck the housing market, Rep. Barney Frank, the “go-to” guy when it comes to fixing the financial system, wants to waste more taxpayer dollars to inflate and thus wreck the housing market.
That about sums it up.
Frank, who is intelligent enough to understand how the economy works, refuses to acknowledge that he played any role in the financial crisis and his prescription for what ails America is more poison.
Instead of temporarily dipping into its nation-sized endowment, Harvard University has decided to lay off 275 workers, Reuters reports:
The Ivy League school took the action to meet budget constraints caused by an estimated 30 percent fall in its endowment for its 2009 fiscal year, ending June 30. [...]
Another 40 staff were offered reduced work hours.
While the layoffs affect a fraction of Harvard’s 16,000 staff and faculty, they illustrate the recession’s toll on America’s oldest institute of higher learning and other universities which depend on endowments and donations.
Harvard’s endowment, which stood at $37 billion on June, 30 last year, tumbled to $29 billion by December and is projected to end this month at about $25 billion, hit by volatility in financial markets and a drop in donations. The endowment funded about a third of Harvard’s operating budget in 2008. [...]
Boo hoo. Poor Harvard and its $25 billion. I feel for the workers at Harvard and for its students who pay exorbitant tuitions while receiving politically correct indoctrination.
Some of the wealthiest universities in America are the biggest tightwads, Lynne Munson argued in an April 2008 Foundation Watch.
Harvard is notoriously tight-fisted. While tuition continues to skyrocket, institutional spending from tax-free higher education endowments (including Harvard’s) remains meager. By sitting on donations –which are largely intended to benefit students– for generations, they violate donor intent.
Last Friday the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center held a symposium on a new monograph entitled “How Public is Private Philanthropy?” issued under the auspices of the Philanthropy Roundtable. The symposium addressed what might at first seem to be a legalistic or semantic question concerning the status of nonprofit organizations. In fact, the issue is decidedly political. It concerns who is entitled to decide what organizations will receive donors’ money?
Leftwing activists argue that private foundations and charities are really “public.” After all, they say, if the IRS rules that a nonprofit is a “public charity” serving a “public” purpose it will then exempt the organization from taxation and it will allow contributions to it to be treated as tax-deductible. Moreover, foundations and charities are chartered by government, which lays down strict rules under which they are permitted to operate. For instance, nonprofits may not undertake activities that principally benefit their trustees, they must not engage in for-profit business activities, and they must payout 5% of their assets annually to qualified charitable recipients. According to the activists, this means nonprofits are “public” not “private.”
Liberal foundation-watchers say the argument is just a matter of semantics, but conservatives suspect that radical activists are making the claim in order to prepare the way for more government regulation of the nonprofit sector. Conservatives point to efforts by California’s Greenlining Institute to promote AB 624, a bill introduced in the state legislature that would have required large California foundations to report on the extent of their efforts to assist charities designated as minority-led and serving minority and “marginalized” groups. The bill required foundations to report on the race and gender of their board members and it wanted reports on whether the foundation assisted charities serving seven designated minority groups. A California legislator withdrew the bill from consideration by the legislature only after the big foundations promised to voluntarily share this information and increase their giving to these specified groups.
Recently the leftist National Center for Responsive Philanthropy issued a report that also called upon foundations to be “inclusive,” which it defined as 1) giving 50% of their money to low-income groups, “communities of color” and other “marginalized” groups and 2) giving at least 25% of their money to advocacy groups promoting “equity, opportunity and justice” in our society.
This appears to be the start of an organized pressure campaign by activist groups working in concert with politicans to shakedown grantmakers. In its starkest terms, gifts to Jesse Jackson’s Operation Push could count as support for inclusive and marginalized giving; gifts to the Heritage Foundation won’t. One might also expect the zoo, the opera and the local historic preservation society to adapt their missions to include support for and representation from preferential groups in order to stay solvent. They and their donors will have an incentive to remain within the giving guidelines of the Greenlining Institute, the National Center for Responsive Philanthropy and potentially the California state legislature.
Glenn Lammi, legal counsel at the Washington Legal Foundation and a speaker at the Bradley symposium, said government oversight of charities is traditionally intended to assure donors that charities and foundations are fulfilling their chosen missions and that their managers are not using their positions to benefit themselves. But the new efforts to narrow the definition of what is in the ” public interest” or the interest of the “underserved” constitutes an attack on democratic pluralism and individual freedom. Lammi asks:
“Will the poor and disadvantaged really benefit from the political logrolloing and special interest favors that will ultimately result from a politicization of charity?”
To read Lammi’s statement, click here. (Word file)
ACORN may be about to embark on a huge rebranding effort in order to reinvent itself.
As I told the Washington Times, the revelation that disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke has renamed ACORN International, which is ACORN’s international consultancy, is a sign that Rathke is trying to dissociate the ACORN affiliate from the oceans of bad ink ACORN has received in the U.S. over the last year.
There’s no point in reinventing the wheel so to speak, so I’ll just quote myself (which I confess feels a little weird).
“The brand is tarnished and he doesn’t want to be associated with ACORN because of all the problems that he is, ironically, largely responsibly for,” the Washington Times quoted me saying. “He just wants to keep up his community organizing without being burdened by the bad public relations.”
The new name for the international affiliate is Community Organizations International.
“This may indeed be the beginning of an ACORN network-wide rebranding, but a rotten ACORN by any other name still stinks,” Newsmax quoted me saying.
Newsmax reported that I described ACORN International as “a nonprofit group that aspires to spread the gospel of [radical community organizer] Saul Alinsky across the globe.”
Something about this rebranding-in-progress –if that’s what it really is– doesn’t seem right, though.
As I noted earlier today, ACORN is suing whistleblower Anita MonCrief to shut her up. ACORN also sent a cease-and-desist letter to the reformers of the ACORN 8 in order to bully them into silence.
It doesn’t make sense to use up legal resources on these activities if the ACORN network is preparing to change its name in an effort to improve its image. It could be the case that Rathke himself, who was forced out as chief organizer of ACORN last year after officials learned he covered up his brother’s $1 million embezzlement for eight years, took the initiative all by himself.
It could also be the case that ACORN is serious about protecting its property, including its ACORN trademark (as it claims in the lawsuit against MonCrief and the letter to ACORN 8 ) and told Rathke in no uncertain terms that he couldn’t use it anymore.
Bloomberg quoted Goldman Sachs saying late last month that the U.S. government would have to sell $3.25 trillion (with a T!) in debt this fiscal year in order to meet its obligations:
Obama has increased the U.S. marketable debt to an unprecedented $6.36 trillion to fund bank bailouts, stimulus spending and the budget deficit. The government will have to sell a record $3.25 trillion of Treasuries in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc., one of the 16 primary dealers required to bid at Treasury debt auctions.
A massive increase in the money supply will wreak havoc. We are so screwed.
As I noted a few days ago, the thoroughly corrupt activist group ACORN is threatening the ACORN 8, a reform group headed by Marcel Reid and Karen Inman, because it’s afraid of them and wants to shut them up. The group argues the ACORN 8 is violating ACORN’s intellectual property by using the word “ACORN” in its name.
It recently sent the ACORN 8 a “cease and desist” letter. Here is a PDF of the June 11 letter from ACORN lawyer Arthur Z. Schwartz of the New York City law firm of Schwartz, Lichten & Bright PC. Blogger Procrustes has some background information on the longtime activist lawyer.
Lying and threatening is standard operating procedure at ACORN.
ACORN is also suing whistleblower Anita MonCrief to shut her up.
David Weigel of the Washington Independent has a good article on the Washington Examiner’s aggressive approach to investigative journalism. It begins:
For the first few years of George W. Bush’s presidency, Mark Tapscott was a journalist without a newsroom, shouting from the sidelines about his industry’s swift decline. Tapscott ran the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Media and Public Policy, and trained reporters in the use of technology for research and crunching numbers. When he considered how few conservatives, libertarians, or real skeptics of federal power were working in newsrooms, he saw a problem that was making the growth of government possible.
“The [Freedom of Information Act],” Tapscott wrote in a 2004 commentary, “has been subverted from its original intent – shining light in all corners of the federal establishment – and used instead by the bureaucrats, special interests and politicians who live off the Nanny State, especially those hiding behind closed doors in places like Health and Human Services, the Education Department and Housing and Urban Development.”
Sitting up straight in his office at the Washington Examiner, where Tapscott has been the editorial page editor for three years, he repeats the point. “There are 57 people in the Freedom of Information Hall of Fame,” he says. “Three of them are conservatives — two of them, if you don’t count me. Now, that’s a problem.”
Since its launch in 2005, the second daily metro newspaper owned by conservative billionaire Phillip Anschutz (the first was the San Francisco Examiner) has struggled for an identity in a city crawling with political journalists. But since the November 2008 election, the Examiner has beefed up its staff and pulled prominent right-leaning reporters and pundits away from publications like The American Spectator and National Review. Tapscott and a growing staff of political and opinion writers are carving out an identity as the conservative version of the left-leaning opinion and investigative journalism sites that — in the view of many conservatives — have used reporting to embarrass conservatives and the Republican Party. [...]
The Washington Examiner now has a team of big names working for it including David Freddoso, J.P. Freire, Michael Barone, Kevin Mooney, and Byron York.
Weigel is an above-board guy (and the acknowledged king of trivia–if you’re competing on a trivia night team, get him on your team or you will lose) though his employer, the Washington Independent, I should note, is a left-leaning media outlet that is part of the Center for Independent Media, which has taken in at least $263,500 from far-left Tides Center and Tides Foundation in the last three years alone. The Center for Independent Media used to share office space with the sleazy character assassins at serial liar David Brock’s Media Matters for America. The two organizations also shared accounting firms too.
But not all parts of the left-leaning blogosphere are doing well. Some evidence suggests the Huffington Post Investigative Fund is struggling.
Meanwhile, we’ve had two articles out in recent months on the state of American journalism.
Tim Cavanaugh penned “Bailing Out the Press: Can Non-Profit Status Save American Newspapers?” Here’s a summary of the Foundation Watch article:
Could a bailout of the newspaper industry be on its way? A new Senate bill would offer financially struggling newspapers non-profit status in order to save investigative journalism. Critics say it probably won’t work, gives nonprofit media a tax advantage, could subject the free press to IRS oversight, and could open the door to more serious government interference in the media. But when has that ever stopped a crusading politician?
Before that Cheryl K. Chumley wrote “ProPublica: Investigative Journalism or Liberal Spin?” Here’s a summary of that Foundation Watch article:
The press is filled with sad stories about venerable for-profit newspapers that have been forced to declare bankruptcy and shut down. So it’s striking that the billionaire liberals Herb and Marion Sandler have decided now is the time to fund a new nonprofit group called ProPublica whose mission is to serve the public interest by funding independent investigative journalism. Too bad Pro Publica churns out little more than left-wing hit pieces about Sarah Palin and blames the U.S. government for giving out too little foreign aid.
Fox News posted the clip from my appearance yesterday on the “Glenn Beck Program.” I was talking to Mr. Beck about the radical roots of ACORN.
As expected, my appearance was mocked by the know-nothings at News Hounds (”We watch FOX so you don’t have to.”):
“This is not some wild-eyed conspiracy theory,” Vadum added gravely.
Mind you, neither he nor Beck had offered a single fact to show that ACORN was socialist, revolutionary or in any way disreputable, much less show any connection between it and Obama or even Ms. Booth in 2009. But on a day when Beck’s sensitive widdle feewings were obviously still tender from the massive ego hit he took two nights before at the party, maybe smearing others with unproven conspiracy theories was his way of telling himself he’s still a big man, after all.
Ha. What a silly comment. How much information can one share with an audience in a mere five minutes? Give me a break. Anyway, I have already shown how ACORN was created and have documented at length the bad things that the group has done and is continuing to do.
