Citigroup executive Eric Eve (pictured below) has resigned from ACORN’s phony, allegedly independent panel, a move that removes one of the few people on the panel who could even remotely claim to actually be independent.

If you read between the lines, it also seems to mean Citigroup agrees the panel is a sham. According to ACORN, the advisory council was established in early 2009 “to help facilitate a transition to a new management team under the leadership of CEO Bertha Lewis.” The emergence of the undercover prostitution sting videos in September gave the council another problem to mull over. 

Eve, senior vice president of Global Consumer Group, Community Relations, at Citigroup, quit after the National Legal and Policy Center pressed Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit to cut ties with ACORN.

In a letter to NLPC president Peter Flaherty, Citigroup announced Eve’s resignation from the panel.

“We too are deeply concerned about the recent media reports regarding ACORN and, because of those reports, have suspended our charitable financial support and program relationships with ACORN, and we are awaiting the results of the independent audit of ACORN activities now underway,” wrote Natalie Abatemarco, Citigroup’s vice president, Global Community Relations.

“On a related topic, please be advised that Eric Eve has resigned his position on the ACORN Advisory Council,” she added.

Citigroup is a Big Government lovers’ bank that funds just about every trendy left-wing cause in America.

Long before it started drowning in red ink, the poster child for so-called corporate social responsibility was a longtime donor to left-wing pressure groups such as Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s Nature Conservancy. In tax year 2003, Citigroup’s foundation gave 20 times more money to groups on the left than to groups on the right, according to Capital Research Center’s 2006 study of Fortune 100 foundation giving. (Foundation Watch, August 2006.)

Citigroup’s foundation has given a staggering $1.4 million to the alarmist World Resources Institute, as well as $509,000 to ACORN in recent years. The ACORN funding included a $500,000 grant to ACORN’s American Institute for Social Justice, which offers Saul Alinsky-style training in community organizing. Other donations to liberal groups include the Aspen Institute ($762,500), Rainbow/PUSH Coalition ($750,000), Nature Conservancy ($380,000), Rainforest Alliance ($200,000), and the Council on Foreign Relations ($50,000).

For her part, former ACORN national board member Marcel Reid never believed the council would accomplish anything. Reid and board member Karen Inman were expelled from ACORN by chief organizer Bertha Lewis for asking too many questions about the $1 million embezzlement perpetrated by ACORN founder Wade Rathke’s brother and then covered up for eight years.

When Reid, who is now a member of a reform group called ACORN 8, first heard of the panel, she told me this:

As former members of the Interim Management Committee elected by the national board of ACORN, we say that all of the things that this so-called independent panel is going to examine are things that we tried to accomplish. We called for all of these things –an audit, examination of the books, restructuring of the organization— all of this was already demanded by us.

And because we were trying to exercise due diligence as duly constituted directors of ACORN, we were relieved from our positions, forced out by the board under Bertha Lewis’s direction.

We have no idea how an independent, thorough audit of ACORN can be conducted by these people who were not selected by ACORN’s national board but were put in place by the same senior staff who conspired with Wade Rathke to cover up his brother’s embezzlement for eight years and who subsequently silenced any voice that called for truth, transparency and accountability.

Former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger was appointed by ACORN to lead an investigation after the undercover videos made headline news. He’s a former president of the left-leaning group Common Cause.

The members of the advisory council are ACORN allies and funders.

The members are

* John Podesta, President and CEO, Center for American Progress

* Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Board Member, RFK Foundation, former MD Lt. Governor

* Andrew Stern, International President, Service Employees International Union

* Henry Cisneros, Executive Chairman, Cityview (and a former HUD secretary)

* John Banks, Vice President of Government Relations, Con Ed

* Harvey Hirschfeld, President, Lawcash

* Dave Beckwith, Executive Director, Needmor Fund

Podesta helped manage Obama’s presidential transition team and heads the aggressively left-wing Center for American Progress. The center is heavily funded by George Soros and the subprime mortgage hucksters Herb and Marion Sandler.

Podesta has always been there for ACORN in its time of need. When ACORN got hit with a new wave of election fraud-related charges in May, the Center’s “Progress Action Fund” invited liberal and radical groups – including Harshbarger’s Common Cause – to a meeting in Washington, D.C., to plan how to use rhetorical misdirection to take the focus off ACORN’s increasingly well publicized corruption.

Andy Stern of SEIU is a longtime crusader for something called “social justice.” Social justice is when you have more toys than your friends, so your friends hit you over the head and take some of your toys away. That way everyone is equal. That’s social justice.

SEIU is intimately connected to ACORN but since the undercover sting videos surfaced showing ACORN employees giving advice on how to break the law, it’s trying to distance itself from the group.

Good luck with that, SEIU.

Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell said he doesn’t believe ACORN’s claim that only $948,000 was embezzled by Dale Rathke, who is the brother of disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke.

“There may be some question as to whether it was $3.5 (million), $2.8 (million), it’s more than a million,” Caldwell said.

Caldwell said he’s waiting to see the ACORN financial records he’s subpoenaed before deciding if charges can be laid.

“We’re not going to take their word for anything,” Caldwell said. “We’re going to take their records and let the records speak for themselves.”

My inside ACORN sources say the sum embezzled really is around $1 million and that talk of a higher figure is based on a misunderstanding.

We’ll see.

The Louisiana attorney general’s office says the embezzlement at ACORN years ago involved $5 million, not the originally reported figure of close to $1 million, according to BigGovernment.com which cites a report from NOLA.com.

The $5 million figure is reportedly mentioned in a subpoena. My sources inside ACORN say the $5 million figure is an exaggeration.

Current ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis reportedly today denied the figure was $5 million. Lewis is scheduled to speak at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., tomorrow at 10 a.m.

Meanwhile, Karen Inman, who was a national board member at ACORN until Lewis expelled her for asking too many questions about the embezzlement, writes about ACORN’s corruption at the Minnesota Public Radio website. Inman is a co-founder of the reform group ‘ACORN 8.’

Inman’s post was published hours before the news broke that the embezzlement figure had been upwardly revised by the Louisiana attorney general.

Michelle Malkin adds that the $5 million figure is not new at all.

(This post was revised repeatedly as new information came in.)

Jaime E. Feliciano, president of the radical Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1000 District Labor Council 784, has been convicted of possessing child pornography.

Even before the kiddie porn charges were laid, Feliciano was already a convicted sex offender, the Sacramento Bee reported last year. The paper reported that according to court records, “Feliciano was convicted in 1993 of lewd or lascivious act with a child under the age of 14 years, which is a felony.”

Two SEIU locals, 100 in New Orleans and 880 in Chicago, are ACORN affiliates. The chief organizer of Local 100 is Wade Rathke, who was expelled last year from ACORN for orchestrating an eight-year long coverup of his brother’s embezzlement of nearly $1 million from ACORN. ACORN insider Keith Kelleher is chief organizer of Local 880.

Six months ago, ACORN tried to cover up the fact that Locals 100 and 880 are part of the ACORN network.

Was this photo taken at Shining Path headquarters? (just kidding) ACORN founder Wade Rathke (left) and ACORN enabler Drummond Pike (right) in an undated photo taken in Peru. On the wall is a large poster of community organizers Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. (photo: Pike’s blog)

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Blogger intrepid liberal (Robert Ellman) has posted on the left-wing DailyKos website his article, “The Ultimate Organizer: An Interview With ACORN’s Founder Wade Rathke.”

In the nearly half hour podcast, Rathke discusses his book, Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign To Save Working Families, serves up some community organizing war stories, and offers his thoughts on the future of organizing. According to Ellman:

Veteran activist Wade Rathke has been steadily climbing that wall on behalf of working people for forty-years. As the founder of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform (“ACORN”), Rathke has a unique perspective about what community organizing strategies work best to empower working people that are struggling to save and accumulate wealth. Rathke is also an assertive advocate for welfare benefits on behalf of people out of work. He’s both won and lost more than his share of battles. Both he and ACORN have the battle scars of scrutiny liberals typically receive from standing up for America’s poor and disenfranchised.

Rathke was fired as chief organizer of ACORN last year after it was revealed that his brother had embezzled nearly $1 million from the organization and that Rathke had covered up the theft for eight years.

In the interview he says that Americans are not getting all the government benefits they are legally entitled to and that they should claim what society owes them.

This is, of course, the Cloward-Piven Strategy of orchestrated crisis. Rathke, and those like him, want to overload the system in order to overthrow it.

Their job has been made easier because the Clinton era welfare reforms were erased in the stimulus package that President Obama signed into law in February.

I have an article called “ACORN Sells Out the Poor” in today’s American Spectator.

Here’s the top of it:

The relentlessly sanctimonious Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now may not deserve its carefully cultivated image as a defender of the poor.

That’s because the group has become the leading cheerleader for a controversial real estate development that is slated to use eminent domain to remove the poor people it claims to represent.

ACORN, which has long prided itself on fighting the so-called gentrification of neighborhoods as rising property values force the poor to move, has also taken money from the project’s developer and signed a binding agreement forcing it to stand behind the project no matter what.

In the world of corporate shakedowns it is commonplace for liberal activist groups to use the money they extract from a supposed “donor” to fund operations, but it is very unusual for a group to take money in exchange for betraying those it is supposed to represent.

But the far-left activist group ACORN, which claims to defend the poor from what ACORN ally Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) last year called America’s “capitalist predators,” is doing precisely that.

In 2005, ACORN signed an agreement with Forest City Ratner Companies, LLC, a megabucks real estate development firm, pledging its support for the ambitious Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn, New York. [...]