Via LGF Spinoff links comes this 2006 Wall Street Journal article about ACORN, and its Socialist founder Wade Rathke. In the article, a former employee declares that the disorganization that leads to fraud is intentional.
Current and former Acorn employees say the problems in Kansas City and St. Louis are no accident. “There’s no quality control on purpose, no checks and balances,” says Nate Toler, currently head organizer of an Acorn campaign against Wal-Mart in Merced, Calif. In 2004 he worked on an Acorn voter drive in Missouri, and says Acorn statements aren’t to be taken at face value: “The internal motto is ‘We don’t care if it’s a lie, just so long as it stirs up the conversation.’”
If true this would confirm earlier suspicions that the current rash of ACORN voter registration fraud is intentionally designed to cause a loss of confidence in the US electoral process.
The article also explores some of ACORN’s rank hypocricy. ACORN founder Wade Rathke is known as a union organizer, but the funny thing is ACORN is not a union operation, and resists unionization of its own workforce!
Loretta Barton, until June of this year a lead Acorn organizer from Dayton, Ohio, and another EEOC complainant, told me that “all Acorn wanted from registration drives was results.” Ms. Barton alleges that when she and her co-workers asked about forming a union they were slapped down: “We were told if you get a union, you won’t have a job.”…
…Acorn is vulnerable to charges it doesn’t practice what it preaches. Its manual for minimum-wage campaigns says it intends “to push for as high a wage as possible.” But it doesn’t pay those wages. In 2004 Acorn won a $9.50 an hour minimum wage in Santa Fe, N.M., for example, but pays its organizers $25,000 a year for a required 54-hour week–$8.90 an hour. This year Acorn had workers in Missouri sign contracts saying they would be “working up to 80 hours over seven days of work.” Mr. Rathke says “We pay as much as we can. If people can get more elsewhere, we wish them well.”In 1995 Acorn unsuccessfully sued California to be exempt from the minimum wage, claiming that “the more that Acorn must pay each individual outreach worker . . . the fewer outreach workers it will be able to hire.” Mr. Rathke acknowledges higher wages can cost some jobs but that the raises for other workers are worth it.
Previous Posts:
ACORN COVER UP: Barack Obama’s Political Family Tree Is Red
Oops!… Obama Camp Caught Scrubbing Its “Fight the Smears” Webpage on ACORN
