I have an article in today’s American Spectator about ACORN’s racketeering and money laundering activities.

Here’s the top of it:

Is ACORN engaged in a massive money laundering scheme?

Although evidence abounds that the radical left-wing advocacy group-cum-organized crime syndicate is recycling funds mafia-style, government investigators and the media have paid scant attention to ACORN’s money trail.

Red flags that appear to signal unlawful activities by ACORN are everywhere yet ACORN’s collaborators in the White House, Justice Department, and House Judiciary Committee, smugly ignore them.

If senior executives at a troubled publicly traded corporation were to provide completely different accounts of their company’s financial standing, how long would it be before federal investigators stormed their offices? If federal authorities failed to act, how long would it be before the media and the public began to accuse the powers that be of complicity in their wrongdoing?

We shall see.

I have just discovered that three senior ACORN officials have recently given wildly divergent accounts of the size of ACORN’s budget.

ACORN current CEO and chief organizer Bertha Lewis claimed in October that ACORN had an “average budget” between “$20 [million] and $25 million a year for everything, all of the offices combined.”

ACORN national president Maude Hurd reported in the ACORN entry of Erica Payne’s handbook for liberal activists, The Practical Progressive, that ACORN’s annual budget last year was $50 million. [...]

In “Understanding ACORN,” an essay published earlier this year, ACORN founder Wade Rathke said ACORN’s annual budget was north of $100 million. “Each year we raise and spend over $100 million, of which a significant part comes from dues and internal fundraising, but big chunks come from campaign support and labor and corporate partnerships,” he wrote.

So, is it $100 million, $50 million, or $25 million? [...]

Disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke says the group he created might not make it another year, reports the (Memphis, Tenn.) Commercial Appeal.

“The organization has become the focal point of the Right,” Rathke said.

The article says little more worth repeating.

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.

Mike Volpe, who blogs as The Provocateur, presents the third installment of his interview with ACORN founder Wade Rathke.

Volpe observes

I’ve come to the conclusion that Wade Rathke’s goal is to rule the world. If you think about what community organizing is, the whole thing makes perfect sense. A good organizer will organize a lot of people. A really good organizer will organize even more. How do you measure someone’s worth in community organizing? It’s by how many people they’ve organized. It’s by how much influence they’ve had in they issue they organize for. Furthermore, effective organizing means a synergy of media outreach, political outreach, and community outreach. Effective organizing means the ability to reach your tentacles into all levels of society. Make no mistake, the reason that ACORN became a force in our society has everything to do with the organizing genius of Wade Rathke.

Love him or hate him, Rathke is a fascinating guy.

Blogger Michael Volpe’s second interview with ACORN founder Wade Rathke is available here.

Mike Volpe, who blogs under the name The Provocateur, scored an interview with disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke.

It’s worth reading.

Most interesting to me is the passage in which Rathke denies ACORN ever broke any laws.

ACORN’s national leadership has taken over the Louisiana chapter of the group after ousting its leader, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports. 

ACORN boss Bertha Lewis canned Beth Butler, the common law wife of disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke, as leader of ACORN’s state-level operation in the Crescent City last week. 

ACORN’s national organization held a hush-hush meeting in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., this past weekend.

At the meeting, apparently, ACORN national President Maude Hurd appointed Stephen Bradberry, former Louisiana head organizer as chief administrator of the local operation. The newspaper reports that “[a]n ad-hoc committee of five national board members, none from Louisiana, will have oversight of the new structure, which is described under ACORN bylaws as a ‘provisional administratorship.’”

Butler says she’s in the process of starting her own community group, apparently with the help of ACORN national board member Vanessa Gueringer.

The newspaper reported that Gueringer and others are contemplating suing “to gain control of the Louisiana ACORN resources, including membership dues, property and recovery grants that are now in control of the national organization.”

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.

ACORN boss Bertha Lewis has fired Beth Butler, common law wife of disgraced founder Wade Rathke, FOXNews.com is reporting.

According to FOXNews.com:

Butler said she was fired because she refused to fire members of a land trust board whom national ACORN leaders wanted ousted. She said ACORN national is “going out of business” and wanted the board gone to seize control of its funds and assets. She called the ordeal “all completely inappropriate and unethical.”

I reported a full nine days ago that ACORN is shutting its headquarters in New Orleans. I reported a month and a half ago that ACORN was closing offices nationwide and laying off its employees.

Updated later same day: Michelle Malkin has a more detailed account of Butler getting the bum’s rush from ACORN. I reported last year that ACORN was in the grips of a power struggle.

SEIU international secretary-treasurer Anna Burger sent a letter to Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), a response to a question the congressman asked her at a hearing last week.

Here is the letter.

SEIU claims that its Local 100 (headed by ACORN founder Wade Rathke) and Local 880 (headed by ACORN insider Keith Kelleher) are no longer affiliated with SEIU. SEIU also claims to have severed all ties with ACORN.

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.)

I keep hearing from some people that disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke resigned from the group he created.

That’s not true. He was dismissed — with cause.

The minutes of the ACORN national board meeting on June 20, 2008, show that on a vote of 29 to 14 the board approved a motion that Rathke “shall immediately and permanently be terminated from all employment with ACORN and its affiliated organizations or corporations. Further more [sic], Mr. Rathke should be removed from all boards & any leadership roles with ACORN or its affiliated organizations or corporations.”

I really like the way the ACORN story is told in today’s New York Post.

ACORN is sleazy, criminal, and dangerous and the tabloid style of storytelling is ideal for explaining what the group is all about.

I spent quite a bit of time with reporter Ginger Adams Otis on the phone this past week and she turned out an excellent summary of what ACORN is all about.

Here it is in today’s New York Post.

A timely graphic from Mike Cope:

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.

ACORN founder Wade Rathke didn’t have a problem with domestic terrorists trying to kill delegates at the Republican Party’s national convention in 2008, former radical community organizer Brandon Darby suggests at Andrew Breitbart’s new website Big Government.

Darby, who got to see how the ACORN crime syndicate operates up close in New Orleans, writes that after he acknowledged that he helped the FBI foil a plot to attack the RNC convention in Minnesota Rathke denounced him on his blog. Darby writes

What does any of this have to do with ACORN? I wondered the same thing on January 31^st of 2009 when I was reading an ACORN blog that is run by Wade Rathke (the man who claims credit for founding ACORN). He devoted an entire page to my work with the FBI. How did he describe the FBI’s effort and success in preventing innocent Americans, local police and federal agents from being burned, maimed and/or possibly killed by firebombs? He wrote that it’s “one thing to disagree, but it’s a whole different thing to rat on folks.”  That is what ACORN’s founder had to say about my role in stopping a bomb plot.

Indeed Rathke did write that. He described Darby as ”an FBI-informer who had fingered some folks for mayhem designed for the Republican National Convention in 2008 in the Twin Cities.” Added Rathke, “It seemed so, how should I say it, sixties?”

There it is in black and white. ACORN founder Wade Rathke resented Darby working with the authorities to disrupt a left-wing terrorist plot.

Here’s another way to look at it: if you oppose ACORN’s agenda, you deserve to be murdered.