By Matthew Vadum
May 17, 2010
While the Obama administration runs away from ACORN here in the United States it is quietly embracing ACORN overseas.
The Obama administration is using U.S. government resources to help the embattled radical advocacy organization spread the gospel of left-wing community organizing in India.
President Obama’s ambassador to India, Timothy J. Roemer, recently lent his name and the prestige of the U.S. government to ACORN India’s efforts to organize rag-pickers in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay). Roemer is a former Democratic congressman who represented an Indiana district.
The website of the U.S. embassy in India displays a photograph from May 11 in which Ambassador Roemer is shown meeting with rag pickers in Dharavi, a slum in the suburbs of Mumbai. The official caption accompanying the picture indicates Roemer was discussing “ACORN India’s local waste management and recycling program.”
The Indo-Asian News Service confirmed in a report that day that Roemer spent time at the ACORN facility and met with ACORN India representative Vikram Adige.
The U.S. consulate in Mumbai, headed by Consul General Paul A. Flombsee, also co-sponsored a water conservation event on March 22 with ACORN India. Flomsbee is listed as the expected guest of honor at the event on ACORN India’s website.
ACORN India reports to ACORN International, which now goes by the name Community Organizations International. ACORN International serves as an umbrella organization for the various national organizations conducting ACORN’s business outside the U.S. ACORN International’s Facebook page describes the group’s mission as “building community groups in low income communities across the world to organize for power.”
ACORN International is active in Argentina, Canada, Dominican Republic, Honduras, India, Kenya, Mexico, and Peru.
One of the reasons the group was created was to allow ACORN to apply its corporate shakedown techniques against Western corporations as they expand into rapidly developing markets such as India.
ACORN India’s website declares that the group was created to help defend the “socialist legacy” of Jawaharlal Nehru, a leftist who was prime minister of India from 1947 to 1964. That “legacy” is “now in danger from the onslaught of the march of global corporatism,” according to the website.
“Countries like India are the next frontiers of significant market expansion for multi-national corporations; and these corporations are now starting to apply extreme pressure on the government of India for unfettered access,” according to ACORN India. “[The] Indian market is facing an onslaught of both foreign and domestic corporate retailers, the most notable of which is Wal-mart.”
ACORN India apparently uses the same aggressive, in-your-face organizing tactics that ACORN uses in the U.S. Its website declares that since 2006 it has “built key relationships with leadership of political parties, trade unions, hawkers and farmers’ groups, peoples’ movements and the media,” along with “community organizations, trade unions, peoples’ movements and [non-governmental organizations], thus engaging progressively in poverty alleviation and urban development.”
Read more:
http://dailycaller.com/2010/05/17/obama-administration-helps-acorn-defend-socialism-%e2%80%93-in-india/#ixzz0oHrdVSor
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ADD THIS: Excerpts from an interview of Wade Rathke.
People that know him, and know him well, have described him as an “organic genius” and a “diabolical genius”. He’s become a lightning rod and a polarizing figure, and he’s at the center of a national debate. Wade Rathke is the former long time CEO, or Chief Organizer, of ACORN, the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now. He’s now running Community Organizations International, the former ACORN International.
The one impression I got of Rathke is his pleasant demeanor. If the pressure and stress of the controversy surrounding ACORN has gotten to him, he certainly didn’t express it outwardly. Several folks told me that to be a good organizer you have to have a pleasant demeanor. I next turned to some questions about ACORN itself and it was at this point that the interview, which was almost exclusively pleasant, became contentious. I asked him what he had learned from his experience at ACORN and how he would try to apply that to COI. He was coy as though he didn’t understand what I was asking though I believe he did. He told me the structure of ACORN is different than the structure of COI. ACORN, according to Rathke, was one corporation while COI was a federation. In that, COI is currently in seven different countries. Yet, each country is its own separate entity. Meanwhile, all of ACORN’s affiliates, according to Rathke, were all part of the same organization. Yet, I pointed, Rathke was in control of the entire federation.
I said that a cynic would believe that the bank accounts of ACORN Dominican Republic and ACORN Canada (each individual country in COI still uses the ACORN name) would eventually be comingled. Rathke responded that international banking laws would never allow such things.
First, if Rathke sits at the top of this “federation”, it’s still unclear to me how each is separate. Without knowing who controls each bank account, it’s still not clear that funds can’t be comingled. Second, and much more importantly, ACORN always claimed that affiliates were separate of each other. Here, Rathke told me what many that want ACORN reformed have suggested, if not accused. That’s that ACORN and its affiliates aren’t separate but all part of the same organization, ACORN itself. What Rathke told me about ACORN’s structure is exactly the same as what many critics of ACORN have accused the group of doing.
On the issue of Saul Alinsky, he told me that all organizers owe at least some inspiration to Saul Alinsky. Saul Alinsky was able to drive imagination for idealistic youth. He showed people like Wade Rathke that community organizing can be a profession, a calling, and a way of life. It wasn’t something his high school guidance counselor ever told him was possible. Far more than anything he did as an organizer, Saul Alinsky inspired with words, speeches, and several books.
Several people told me that much Alinsky has become an adjective and a verb, that one day Rathke would be synonymous with a style of organizing. With no hint of modesty, Rathke agreed.
Wade Rathke is trying to do in the world what he did in the US. That is to grow a community to serve the poor and middle class throughout the world. People from all sides of the philosophical and ideological aisle will fill in the blanks on that statement. Ultimately, that chapter has only begun. It is the story now, and that’s why I wanted the interview. What happened in the past isn’t nearly as interesting as what Rathke wants to do in the future.
Rathke told me that Cloward/Piven was a strategy for a time and place, the late 1960′s. It focused on welfare rights. It was focused an myopic. As the world has evolved, the strategy has become outdated. At the time, the federal government spent a lot more resources on urban renewal. There’s no more race riots.
His own maximum effective participation strategy is much more expansive and in his opinion follows for the times.
In fact, Rathke was being very diplomatic in his description of Cloward/Piven. I spoke with several individuals involved in organizing following the interview. Cloward/Piven is in fact, at least according to them, a way of organizing welfare recipients to demand more and more entitlements until the capitalistic system breaks. What it really is, is a way of reaching the poor. It’s important that without poor there are no rich. Everything is relative. Poor are given all sorts of reasons for why they have a station in life. In this philosophy, the system is blamed for their station in life and you attack the system.
In the view of one, Rathke is more expansive in that he wants to apply a similar philosophy to the world.
Now, think about COI. It’s a confederation of international organizations currently in seven countries. It was started about five years ago. In five years, it might be in seventy countries. Wade Rathke started and founded ACORN (then Arkansas Community Organization for Reform Now) nearly four decades ago. Then, it was an organization of one. It grew into an organization that had tentacles into nearly all parts of our politically, cultural, and media structure by the time he left. This happened because Wade Rathke is a unique and remarkable organizer. He was so good at it, that he gained enough influence to become embedded into governments of all levels in the U.S. So, what was his goal in ACORN? It was to rule the U.S. If you think that’s absurd and provocative, think again about what makes a good community organizer, the biggest community possible. The bigger the community meant bigger influence. That was in the U.S.
COI is a world organization. It knows no borders. It can go anywhere but it’s purpose is the same. Remember, Wade Rathke told me himself that he wants to go into every urban neighborhood. He himself told me he wants to rule the world. There’s nothing provocative or incorrect in what I’m saying. He’s a community organizer. His goal is as big a community as possible. His place of business is the entire world. So, in effect, Wade Rathke wants to rule the world.
Read the ENTIRE 3 Part interview HERE.
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Those that follow ACORN closely know that the organization is skilled in the fine art of
Saul Alinsky and his strategies for organizing. Alinsky put his rules together in order provide a textbook for this without money or natural power to organize and to affect change without the sort of power and connections that those with power would have.
ACORN uses these fundamentals in order to harrass, manipulate and ultimately extort money from powerful people and organizations. Their tactics come from Alinsky rule #13: identify, isolate, freeze and escalate. The blue print works like this. ACORN will identify an individual, usually a powerful head of a powerful organization. They will show up in front of that person’s home with several hundred protestors. Since these powerful folks normally live in quiet and wealthy suburbs, such a commotion will soon be the talk of the neighborhood. The message for this person’s friends and neighbors will be clear “they are a bad person”. By doing so, they will have isolated this person from their friends and neighbors. Soon, not only will the target themself be a pariah but so will their children. That is the process of isolation. At this point, the target thinks that things can’t get worse, and it is then that ACORN only raises the stakes. Not only will ACORN, and their protestors, show up everywhere the target frequents: the mall, the movie theater, the library, etc, but they will be there before the target even shows up. As such, before the target even arrives to their shopping, ACORN will show up with a crew of several hundred to protest them.
All of this is done in order to beat the target into submission. For weeks and months, ACORN goes on a relentless campaign of harrassment in which a powerful CEO can’t seem to shake this group. Wherever they go, ACORN is there, and often they are there before the target. One such campaign involved H&R Block. ACORN showed up at the home of then CEO, Mark Ernst. The relentlessly harrassed him all over his neighborhood. They showed up everywhere he frequented until he became a pariah in his own neighborhood. They finally got concessions. They teamed up to provide free tax service in low income areas. ACORN got a piece of H&R Block’s Emerald Cards. Of course, that’s what the media knows about. What’s almost certain is that ACORN also received, and likely continues to receive, cash payments directly from H&R Block. Of course, we’ll never know how much, if any, cash payments were transferred. That’s because all cash that ACORN receives starts in their so called accounting firm, Citizen’s Consulting Inc. Because both H&R Block and CCI are both private companies, seeing their books is next to impossible. As such any payments are hidden in the books of two companies that aren’t sharing them.
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America….Don’t believe for a second ACORN will vaporize and go away. ACORN will just morph into another entity like a protozoa or virus.
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Obama states in his Book “Dreams from my Father:” “Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change.”
I found the below image on Obama’s own website. If I hadn’t been researching him I wouldn’t recognize it for what it is. Arrogance or Audacity?
Obama Teaches the Alinsky principles of “Power Analysis” and “Relationships built on self-interest” as seen written upon this blackboard; Alinsky keywords.
At the heart of the Alinsky method is the concept of “agitation”–making someone angry enough about the rotten state of his life that he agrees to take action to change it; or, as Alinsky himself described the job, to “rub raw the sores of discontent.”For this is the Alinsky way.
Obama is not a post racial Candidate. His entire life he has tried to figure out how to be a black man and fit in with his white blood. His entire carrear has been focused on the black community using principles laid down by the school of Alinsky. When Obama uses the terms, “change” and “hope” they are keywords of marxist principle. In an Obama world the ‘changes’ he could make as a politician for blacks were more sustainable than what he could accomplish as an organizer.By 1995, he laid out his vision of the agitator-politician in an interview with the Chicago Reader: “What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? As an elected public official, for instance, I could bring church and community leaders together easier than I could as a community organizer or lawyer.”
Link
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Obama and Wade Rathke were disciples/students of Alinsky tactics.
ACORN + SEIU Local 100 = Obama AND Wade Rathke
Will ACORN be absorbed by the National People’s Action group? OR have they be intertwined all along?
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NOT RACIST.
NOT VIOLENT.
JUST NO LONGER SILENT.
