Wade Rathke, Founder of ACORN

[SF-TX]

Fox News is currently running a special on ACORN. The following is information on the founder of ACORN, Wade Rathke:

* Founder and former Chief Organizer of ACORN, a nationwide activist network engaged in "community organizing" and in voter mobilization drives for George Soros' Shadow Party
* Former draft-resistance activist for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
* Former activist in the National Welfare Reform Organization (NWRO) and protegé of its founder George A. Wiley
* Co-founder of the Tides Foundation, along with Drummond Pike. Currently serves as Board Chairman of the Tides Center and member of the Tides Foundation Board of Directors
* Founded Local 100 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in New Orleans and heads it to this day. Rathke is president and co-founder of SEIU's Southern Conference and a member of SEIU's national executive board. He also helped launch the United Labor Union (ULU), which organizes low-skill service workers.
* Rathke chairs the AFL-CIO's Organizers Forum and formerly served as Secretary-Treasurer of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO.



Wade Rathke founded the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), for which he served as Chief Organizer from 1970 to 2008. He is also the co-founder and Chairman of the Tides Center; a Board member of the Tides Foundation; an Executive Board member of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); and Chairman of the AFL-CIO's Organizers Forum. Rathke describes himself as someone who is dedicated to "winning social justice, workers' rights, and a democracy where 'the people shall rule'"; i.e., socialism.

Rathke hails from a family of prosperous orange ranchers in Orange County, California. During the late 1960s he attended Williams College in Massachusetts but dropped out before graduating. He thereafter became a draft-resistance organizer for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and an organizer for George Wiley's National Welfare Reform Organization (NWRO). (For details on NWRO, see the separate entries for George Wiley and the "Cloward-Piven Strategy.")

In 1970, Wiley sent Rathke to Little Rock, Arkansas to begin organizing NWRO chapters in the South. By that time, Wiley -- who was African American -- was coming under attack by black militants who opposed his policy of placing whites such as Rathke in NWRO leadership positions.

Rathke, perhaps sensing that he might soon be demoted or released entirely, in 1970 formed a new organization called Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). He enlisted civil rights workers and trained them in a program (at Syracuse University) patterned after Saul Alinsky's activist tactics.

The group's name was later changed to Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, but the acronym ACORN remained the same. In keeping with George Wiley's original vision, Rathke gave ACORN a wider mission than that of NWRO. Instead of focusing solely on welfare recipients, ACORN would address issues touching all low-income people -- most notably "living wage" ordinances, "affordable" (i.e., taxpayer-funded) housing, mortgage lending, and voter-registration drives. Under Rathke's leadership, ACORN grew rapidly. Today it claims more than 400,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 1,200 chapters in 110 U.S. cities. (The organization is also active in Canada and Mexico).

The Florida recount crisis in the 2000 presidential election served to inject Rathke and his fellow ACORN activists with a heightened sense of urgency to advance their political agendas. Initially, Miami-Dade County's all-Democrat canvassing board moved the recount into a room too small to accomodate reporters or Republican observers. At the same time, the board announced that since its members lacked time to hand-count all the ballots, they would only count some ballots -- presumably, Republicans feared, selecting a disproportionate number of those that had been cast for Al Gore. The ensuing uproar, which featured Republicans pounding on the counting-room door and an angry crowd of Cuban-Americans gathered outside the building demanding entry, persuaded the nervous canvassing board to back down from its illegal plan -- and perhaps prevented the Democrats from stealing the election.

"[W]e allowed conservatives to steal pages from our playbook and do actions on us in Dade County," Rathke later lamented in his magazine Social Policy. "We need an edge, some harder steel on the rim."

With new resolve, Rathke and ACORN thereafter pushed into high gear their efforts to help Democrat candidates win political elections at any cost. Toward that end, ACORN's mass campaigns of voter-registration fraud would reach unprecedented heights in subsequent election cycles. ACORN's paid workers, tasked with registering as many pro-Democrat voters as possible, submitted many tens of thousands of fraudulent voter-registration cards in key voting districts around the United States. By 2008, federal authorities were investigating voter fraud by ACORN in 12 separate states.

On June 2, 2008, Rathke stepped down from his role as ACORN's President. A month after his departure, the organization publicly acknowledged that Dale Rathke -- Wade's brother -- had embezzled nearly $1 million from ACORN and its affiliated groups in 1999 and 2000. ACORN further admitted that for eight years its executives had known about Dale's activity but had kept it secret from almost all of their board members and from law-enforcement authorities.

According to journalist Stephanie Strom, Wade Rathke "said the decision to keep the matter secret was not made to protect his brother but because word of the embezzlement would have put a 'weapon' into the hands of enemies of ACORN, a liberal group that is a frequent target of conservatives who object to its often strident advocacy on behalf of low- and moderate-income families and workers."

Tides Foundation founder and president Drummond Pike personally repaid the embezzled amount to ACORN.

Today Wade Rathke disseminates his political views by means of a blog he administers on his website, WadeRathke.net. In a July 25, 2008 blog post titled "Herr Obama," Rathke celebrated the excitement that had attended Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama's recent tour of Europe:

"Can you remember the last time an American who didn't have a microphone in one hand and a guitar in another drew 200,000 people anywhere in Europe? And, that would have been as part of a festival where they were serving beer at the least. For 200,000 people to come out and hear a candidate for President is an amazing phenomenon. It makes me think that there is an excitement -- and hope -- around the world that America as the world's leader, might actually be a leader and have a leader that the world is willing to respect and hear differently."

In July 2009, ACORNcracked.com editor Kyle Olson visited a Rathke book signing (for Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families), where he interviewed the ACORN founder. In the interview, Rathke confirmed that he was pursuing the so-called "Maximum Eligible Participation" Solution (MEPS), a strategy calling for all Americans eligible for welfare payments to demand every penny to which the law "entitles" them. He urged people to "make sure that other people in the community" are actually getting their due from the government.

The MEPS is essentially an updated incarnation of the old Cloward-Piven Strategy, aiming to orchestrate a crisis that will overwhelm the financial system and cause it to collapse. 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." Rathke has also said that technology should be utilized to make it as easy as possible for people to claim welfare benefits.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1773

[kgoerz]

Wow, I thought the founder of ACORN would be a Gun owning life time Member of the NRA:D

[SF-TX]

ACORN Saga: Founder Wade Rathke Wants YOU — To Go on Welfare
by Matthew Vadum

Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) founder Wade Rathke wants to use the Internet to overthrow the capitalist system.

He said so in his new book, Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families, in which he serves up some community organizing war stories, and offers his thoughts on the future of organizing. Rathke’s currently on a cross-country book tour.

Rathke, a pioneer of the so-called welfare rights movement that aims to get Americans on welfare, 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. He writes:

“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.”

Rathke acknowledges his support for the Cloward-Piven Strategy, an approach to radical social and political change 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.

The strategy helped to bankrupt New York City in 1975. Years later, the Big Apple’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, denounced the academic activists by name. “This wasn’t an accident,” Giuliani argued in a 1997 speech. “It wasn’t an atmospheric thing, it wasn’t supernatural. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare.”

In the Nation article, Cloward and Piven made it clear that they were irritated that plenty of Americans legally eligible to receive forcibly redistributed wealth hadn’t bothered to ask for handouts. “The discrepancy is not an accident stemming from bureaucratic inefficiency; rather, it is an integral feature of the welfare system which, if challenged, would precipitate a profound financial and political crisis.”

In his book Rathke hails “Cloward and Piven’s exciting call to arms.” He notes that the activist group they created and that he organized for in the late 1960s, the now-defunct National Welfare Rights Organization, caused “a flood tide from its work that allowed many boats to rise, including the level of participation in government assistance programs.”

In an interview with DailyKos blogger Robert Ellman, Rathke complains bitterly that Americans are not getting all the government benefits to which they are legally entitled. (The podcast is available here.)

With one question, Ellman unwittingly lays bare the anti-social, profoundly un-American entitlement mentality that so many on the far left possess. The blogger asks if the “lack of participation” in food stamps, Medicaid, and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), all of which many eligible people are not claiming, is “a failure of government, political will, or a culture that demonizes poor people?”

The unctuous Rathke, whom some have called a cult leader, doesn’t miss an opportunity to compliment his interviewer. “Once again you’ve hit the trifecta,” he says. “It’s really all three of those things.”

Rathke quotes approvingly from a New York Times op-ed by his fellow progressive poverty pimp, Barbara Ehrenreich, in which he says she does

[I]a devastating job of looking at the fact that we’re still criminalizing poor people, requiring fingerprints in states like Florida and Texas and California. For even simple welfare applications and food stamp applications, we are going out of our way, and she quotes chapters and verse from various professors, to make it almost easier to do anything in the world other than get benefits that people are legally entitled to.

Incidentally, ACORN knows all about food stamps. Even though people on welfare shouldn’t be trying to buy homes, ACORN cajoled banks into accepting food stamps as income on mortgage applications and then bragged about it.

Returning to the interview, soon Rathke’s comments bring to mind the Will Rogers quip, “Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.” Laying out a strategy for orchestrated crisis for the Information Age, Rathke says:

If we just did the job that we needed to do to make sure everything that’s legally entitled to people actually finally gets to people we would make a huge difference in creating citizen wealth and family security. And there’s no reason not to do this. This is a highly technical age. Why we’re forcing everybody to fill out a million forms, come up with a million different pieces of paper when we could do almost all of it through computers, do it quickly, verify it, keep the records, you know, in PDFs or scanned documents or whatever. There’s a lot of people who know how to do this more than you and I, but this could be a huge breakthrough in eligibility.

Rathke asks, “Why not have computers in grocery stores and community centers — and they are in many libraries now — and in churches and synagogues so that people in working communities have easy access to the software to apply for these benefits.”

What Rathke doesn’t explain is that President Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress made it much easier a few months ago for those like him who want to overload the system in order to bring about its demise.

That’s because the spectacularly successful Clinton era welfare reforms that helped millions of Americans break free from crippling dependency on the public fisc were summarily executed in February. Provisions buried deep in the stimulus package signed by President Obama, who used to work for ACORN, offer new financial incentives to states to increase their welfare caseloads.

ACORN, whose national board fired Rathke a year ago for gross misconduct, won’t have any difficulty causing the next welfare crisis without him, assuming it isn’t shut down by authorities for racketeering or election fraud.

Meanwhile, Rathke isn’t content merely to screw up America.

Like a modern-day Karl Marx in exile, he is doing his best to spread the wealth all around the globe, spreading social justice and shakedown techniques.

After the humiliation of being fired for an eight-year cover-up of his brother Dale’s nearly $1 million embezzlement of ACORN funds, Rathke remains deeply involved with at least three of ACORN’s more than 100 affiliated nonprofits. (Just this past weekend America learned in a New York Post article by Ginger Adams Otis what Dale blew his ill-gotten gains on.)

He recently changed the name of ACORN’s international consultancy, ACORN International, to Community Organizations International. Rathke also remains chief organizer, or CEO, of the New Orleans-based Local 100 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), another ACORN affiliate he founded. He does not appear to have stepped down as president and director of Affiliated Media Foundation Movement (AM/FM), an ACORN affiliate that produces news segments for eight alternative radio stations.

Although Rathke has long drawn inspiration from Saul Alinsky’s legendary political strategy book, Rules for Radicals, he only believes in rules if they benefit him.

To this day he continues to defy the resolution approved on a vote of 29 to 14 by ACORN’s national board on June 20, 2008. It declared that Rathke “be terminated from all employment with ACORN and its affiliated organizations or corporations” and that he “be removed from all boards & any leadership roles with ACORN or its affiliated organizations or corporations.”

Alinsky, who taught the importance of flexibility, would be proud.

(This article is an updated version of an article that ran in the American Spectator in July of this year.)

http://biggovernment.com/2009/09/29/acorn-saga-founder-wade-rathke-wants-you-to-go-on-welfare/