As social justice becomes the new meaning for church among radical progressives, ACORN’s own Bertha Lewisseems to have found a home with Rev. Billy Talen and his anti-capitalist, revolutionary, Earth worshipping Church of Earthalujah. Many of us were treated to the video of her now infamous “Walmart sucks” performance at the church, but are left wondering what kind of church sings anti-capitalism hymns at their services? Is this what church is all about now for the progressive movement?

It was, not coincidentally, May Day when ACORN’s Bertha Lewis was declared a saint as described online inpromotion of the big event:

On May Day we stand with workers and immigrants and take to the streets! We’ll be marching as Reverend Billy and the Stop Big Boxes Gospel Choir along with Bertha Lewis, who will be our saint later that night at 7:30pm at The Church of Earthalujah!

And now, as so many New Yorkers are awash in sentimental Wal-mart ads, Bertha is not among those who are resigned to the arrival of this Giant Devil to the city – she’s leading the charge against the right-wing big box. For that, she will be our newest Fabulous Saint!

When the Rev. Billy Talen brought Bertha up to accept her “canonization,” he spoke of the importance of the attack on ACORN and promised they would “attend to it.”

Speaking in the flamboyant style of Jeremiah Wright, Bertha spoke to the congregation/ticket holders/Marxists or whatever the audience calls themselves:

Acorn is recognizing the struggle, the attacks that the Devil put upon us which was a precursor to Wisconsin. But there’s a New Deal going on right tonight…

She then launches into a moving diatribe (worship song?) about the evil Walmart and its’ oppressed, discriminated-against employees, crescendoing into a rousing chorus of “Walmart sucks.”

As it winds down, she declares:

…as long as I am a saint of the church of Stop Shopping Now, ain’t nobody gonna be shopping there. Amen.

We have to wonder what kind of church would bring out the passion in Bertha like this, and just what are they all about? Let’s start with their leader, the colorful Billy Talen, who ran for Mayor of New York against Bloomberg in 2009.

Rev. Billy is always on the go, as he has been for years. In his latest performance on May 11th, he was arrested for tresspassing at an anti-Koch brothers rally. Rev. Billy relates the horrifying incident this way:

The “Guerrilla Drive-In” at Lincoln Center was an experiment that many of the activists of New York attended – as if this cliff-hanger protest might reveal the future (which, yes, it has). Brave New Foundation, Agit-Pop, The Other 98%, Yes Lab, Critical Mass, the Rude Mechanical Orchestra and our own Church of Earthalujah worked in concert.

I enjoyed a role like that of a band-leader, motioning the congregation toward the west wall of the New York State Theater Building, preaching there a while from the top of a planter. Meanwhile guerrilla projectionists focused giant and savagely funny images of the Koch brothers on the white edifices.

The whole thing was over in a little more than an hour. As we were walking toward our car with our troupe’s director and my partner Savi, who carried our 13 month old Lena, we noticed three muscle-men running toward us through the darkness of the Avenue. SWAT-team-like, they pushed around a while shouting in my face, cuffed me and pushed me into a black car. I vanished into the system for 24 hours in this continuing fetish the NYPD has for jailing the “Billy preacher guy.”

Here are some recent ponderings from Rev. Billy’s blog which should clarify the stance of the “church”:

In a recent speech to the Young Democratic Socialists, an arm of the Democratic Socialists of America, longtime ACORN luminary Bertha Lewis publicly embraced her socialist ideology, declaring: “First of all let me just say any group that says, ‘I’m young, I’m democratic, and I’m a socialist,’ is alright with me.” She also suggested that conservatives planned to reinstitute segregation and set up internment camps in the United States:

“Right now we are living in a time which is going to dwarf the McCarthy era … It is going to dwarf the internments during World War II. We are right now in a time that is going to dwarf the era of Jim Crow and segregation.”

Lewis especially condemned the Tea Party Movement, calling it a “bowel movement” filled with “racism.”

To view Bertha Lewis’ full profile, click here.

ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis is a liar, perhaps even a pathological liar.

She lies about ACORN’s track record, its budget, its size, voter fraud, and so many other things.

Glenn Beck nailed her on yet another lie — and it’s a big one.

As Lewis praised the sham so-called audit by ACORN ally Scott Harshbarger the other day, she forgot a key statement that Harshbarger used in the report that supposedly cleared ACORN with respect to the underage illegal alien sex videos.

Harshbarger went to great pains to argue in a lawyerly way that ACORN Housing was totally and completely legally separate and independent from ACORN, that is, the secretive, non-tax-exempt lead entity that heads the ACORN network.

He also went to an effort to point out that as chief organizer (CEO) of ACORN Bertha Lewis has no authority over ACORN Housing, something those of us who study ACORN know is wholly untrue.

Yet in a discussion of the bad behavior of the ACORN Housing employees shown in the hidden-camera videos encouraging child prostitution and fraud, Lewis bragged that she had taken swift and decisive action against the employees.

Beck showed footage from an Oct. 6 press conference at which Lewis spoke. Lewis said

We took action immediately. So, yes, I terminated those employees. Some of them, it was very sad, because they had been working with us for over 10 years.

Expect the lying to continue and to intensify.

Meanwhile, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is concerned that a proposed “Consumer Financial Protection Oversight Board” may give ACORN a voice in shaping financial regulations.

Provisions creating the oversight board are included in legislation that would establish a federal banking bureaucracy to be called the “Consumer Financial Protection Agency.”

Bachmann said yesterday that the vague wording of the legislation (HR 4173) would allow representatives from ACORN to sit on the board:

Groups such as ACORN that have been indicted in more than a dozen states for voter registration fraud and other crimes have shown that they are incapable of adhering to even the most basic standards of ethics. They should neither play a role in overseeing our nation’s financial system nor be eligible for federal funding.

ACORN was a pioneer in using the Community Reinvestment Act, enacted in 1977, to blackmail banks. Today it is pushing to expand the reach of the law championed by then-President Jimmy Carter and Democrats, even though it played a role in the subprime mortgage meltdown.

Related posts:

1. ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis Doubles Down on Deceit
2. O'Reilly and Beck: ACORN Alert
3. ACORN's Liar-in-Chief Blames Everyone Except Herself

An eagerly anticipated ACORN report that whitewashes the group’s lawbreaking and corruption was unveiled yesterday. ACORN ordered the sham study as political cover in September after videos surfaced showing its employees abetting child prostitution.

I participated in listen-only mode in the teleconference call in which the allegedly independent “audit” was released. I regret it was difficult to make out what the players were saying. That’s because as the left ferociously circled the wagons, all the creaking wheel noises in the background drowned out much of what was said.

One the main points that ACORN ally/former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger (pictured above) and ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis were trying to make was that ACORN and ACORN Housing are separate entities.

Because ACORN Housing and ACORN are different organizations neither is responsible for the other, they argued. In other words, ACORN is not responsible for the ACORN Housing employees caught on video encouraging prostitution and tax fraud, and vice versa, they reasoned.

This is, of course, patent nonsense and rhetorical misdirection. So said Elizabeth Kingsley, ACORN’s lawyer, in an internal legal memo last year.

Kingsley faulted ACORN for “thinking of all these different corporations as part of the family.” ACORN affiliates “have wanted to maintain that they are not ‘affiliated,’ ‘related,’ or ‘controlled’ by or with each other, for various legal purposes, while allowing actual control to be exercised in a highly coordinated manner.” She criticized ACORN for “trying to pretend that these groups are not connected to one another.”

So much for the notion that ACORN’s affiliates, including ACORN Housing, are free of interference from above.

Tax liens pending against ACORN Housing provide more proof that it is run by ACORN headquarters. Currently, 25 tax liens pending against ACORN Housing list the organization’s address as 1024 Elysian Fields Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana, the former funeral home that until recently served as ACORN headquarters. Those 25 tax liens were issued by California, Indiana, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania,  and Texas.

Yet ACORN Housing says its home address is 209 West Jackson Boulevard in Chicago, Illinois.

ACORN Housing (AHC) has also been in trouble in the past for using government money for partisan activities.

“AmeriCorps members of AHC raised funds for ACORN, performed voter registration activities, and gave partisan speeches. In one instance, an AmeriCorps member was directed by ACORN staff to assist the [Clinton] White House in preparing a press conference in support of legislation.” (”Report on the Activities of the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities During the 104th Congress,”  Report 104-875, January 2, 1997)

And while ACORN Housing may have helped some poor people obtain mortgages they otherwise wouldn’t have qualified, that help came at an enormous social cost.

That’s because it helped to convince banks to loosen underwriting standards for mortgages. ACORN Housing even bragged about strongarming banks into accepting food stamps as income on loan applications.

Financial tomfoolery like including food stamps on loan applications was encouraged by the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which opened banking to ACORN-style agitation that over time weakened underwriting criteria and helped to alter the culture of financial institutions in the U.S. This 1977 law, whose enactment ACORN lobbied for, punishes lenders for limiting loans to wealthier, more creditworthy markets, a practice called “redlining.” It gives banking regulators discretionary authority to make trouble for banks that fail to lend enough money to “underserved” minority communities.

After the CRA went into effect, Saul Alinsky-inspired groups such as ACORN used the law to get into the shakedown business. Rev. Jesse Jackson egged them on at an ACORN “banking summit” in 1992, asking rhetorically, “Why did Jesse James rob banks? Because that’s where the money was.”

The shaking down of lenders intensified when then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin presided over the Clinton administration’s effort to put the CRA on steroids. Banks began to make risky subprime loans and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aggregated them for sale in the secondary market as mortgage-backed securities. These practices made it easier for banks to give in to ACORN’s demands to originate more and more doomed mortgages because they knew they could offload their high-risk debt on quasi-governmental suckers Fannie and Freddie, which were under intense political pressure to service the subprime market.

In other words, ACORN Housing, which ACORN supporters now defend as a well-intentioned branch of the ACORN empire, bears partial responsibility for the subprime mortgage meltdown.

Don’t expect ACORN or Congress to actually investigate the activities shown in the undercover videos or the group’s culpability in the nation’s economic woes anytime soon.

Related posts:

1. ACORN's Foreclosure Fraud
2. ACORN's Blackmailing of Banks
3. Strongarming the Banks

It didn’t temper his skepticism that the videos in question featured O’Keefe visiting ACORN offices in a pimp costume, along with a friend, Hannah Giles, dressed as a prostitute, and asking for advice on how to buy a house to run as a brothel for underage Latin American prostitutes. “If James and Hannah had told me ahead of time that they were going to do this, I would have told them, ‘There is no way in hell this is going to work,’” Flynn recalls.

Then he saw the videos. Even with the outrageous get-up—O’Keefe in his grandmother’s faded chinchilla fur coat, red-banded fedora, and dollar-store walking cane, Giles in a tight-fitting leather top and hoop earrings—the pair somehow produced a trove of phenomenally rich material. As they secretly videotaped, ACORN staffers in Washington, Brooklyn, San Diego, and Baltimore offered them instructions on how to evade taxes, skirt legal restrictions, and misrepresent their business to get their fictional whorehouse up and running. In their decidedly unorthodox way, O’Keefe and Giles had landed a major scoop. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe this worked,’” Flynn says.

If the videos were proof positive of O’Keefe and Giles’s journalistic instincts, their eventual success, fueled by mass media exposure, was a testament to the growing sophistication of the conservative media. Suspecting, rightly as it turned out, that mainstream media outlets would initially ignore the ACORN videos, Flynn devised a strategy to market them for maximum impact with his friend, the web entrepreneur and Drudge Report veteran Andrew Breitbart. They decided to release the videos, one by one, to politically friendly Fox News. At the same time, they moved up the launch of Big Government and posted transcripts, lest critics claim that the videos had been doctored.

Their strategy worked to perfection. With Fox bringing the videos to national attention, and with Big Government and other conservative sites stoking the embers of the controversy, the ACORN story became a sensation even as the mainstream press looked the other way. By the time the ensuing storm died down, ACORN Chief Organizer Bertha Lewis had announced an independent review of the group’s operations; some of the employees captured on video had been fired; Congress voted to cut off federal funding to ACORN; and the Census Bureau severed ties with the organization. The conservative commentariat had scored a major political victory. And they had done so using the tactics—investigative reporting and savvy editorial marketing—of the mainstream media they had long reviled.

The ACORN story is just one recent example of the rise of the muckraking right. If the Bush years marked a heyday for liberal sites like Talking Points Memo and the Daily Kos, which combined independent reporting, punditry, and grassroots activism, the Obama era has seen the right embrace muckraking with similar success.

via AFF Doublethink Online » The Rise of the Muckraking Right.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (center) with ACORN ally Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (left), and former California Gov. Gray Davis (right).

Attorney General Eric Holder has made it abundantly clear he has absolutely no interest in investigating his radical friends at ACORN.

It may not matter much, Glenn Beck suggested on his TV show. That’s because ACORN documents found in a dumpster suggest ACORN is considering changing both its name and its legal structure in order to avoid prosecution for its crimes.

Nonetheless, Holder’s Justice Department released a legal opinion last week that allows the Obama administration to ignore the will of Congress which has voted overwhelmingly to suspend federal funding of ACORN until at least Dec. 18. He’s also ignored the 88-page report on ACORN’s systemic corruption and flagrant racketeering activities that was issued this summer by Republican investigators on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Apparently, public outrage at the continuing antics of the corrupt radical advocacy group that used to employ President Obama and White House political director Patrick Gaspard counts for nothing. But Americans really shouldn’t be surprised that Attorney General Holder is bending over backwards to help his radical friends at ACORN. Holder, whom I’ve long argued is unfit to serve as the federal government’s chief law enforcement officer, supports ACORN’s goals.

ACORN wants to use the power of government to bring about a radical transformation of American society. So does Holder. He is unapologetic about his desire to force Big Government down the throats of Americans. Holder rarely misses an opportunity to advocate expanding the size and scope of the federal government. He told a 2004 gathering of the left-wing American Constitution Society, “Government has been the primary force for positive social change in our country’s history. It can be again.”

Like ACORN, he thinks electoral fraud is a myth manufactured by people who want to disenfranchise minorities and the poor. “I think there is a feeling among Republicans that there is a widespread amount of voter fraud out there. I don’t think the statistics actually would substantiate it,” he told Fox News in 2004.

When Darnell Nash, whom ACORN registered to vote nine times, was convicted of vote fraud –not just mere voter registration fraud— in Cleveland earlier this year, Holder couldn’t be bothered to comment. A spokesman for Cleveland prosecutor Bill Mason, a Democrat, told me last month that a local investigation of ACORN remains wide open.

Like ACORN, Holder supports the so-called Fairness Doctrine that would force conservative talk radio hosts off the air Hugo Chavez-style. He told the American Constitution Society:

The nation must be reminded that the word liberal is more than a conservative slur. The nation must be reminded that it was the progressive, liberal tradition that brought about the social and economic changes that were necessary many years ago. The nation must be convinced that it is a progressive future that holds the greatest promise for equality and the continuation of those policies that serve to support the greatest number of our people. In the short term this will not be an easy task. With the mainstream media somewhat cowered by conservative critics, and the conservative media disseminating the news in anything but a fair and balanced manner, and you know what I mean there, the means to reach the greatest number of people is not easily accessible.

Also like ACORN, Attorney General Holder hates conservatives. Viscerally. His public utterances are weighted down with the same old tiresome liberal clichés about those on the right one might find on the ultra left-wing Daily Kos hate site.

Holder told the American Constitution Society gathering that “conservatives have been defenders of the status quo, afraid of the future, and content to allow to continue to exist all but the most blatant inequalities.” They have “made a mockery of the rule of law.” Conservatives try to “put the environment at risk for the sake of unproven economic theories, to play to the fears of our citizens, and not to their hopes, and to return the nation to a time that in fact never existed.”

Conservatives are “breathtaking” in their “arrogance,” Holder claimed. “From redistricting schemes, to attacks on abortion rights, to energy policies that are as shortsighted as they are ineffective, to tax cuts that disproportionately favor those who are well off and perpetuate many of the inequities in our nation, the conservative movement has been unafraid to push the limits in advancing this agenda.”

Holder denounced what he called “the conservative agenda of social division, mindless tax cutting, and a defense posture that does not really make us safer.”

ACORN’s chief organizer Bertha Lewis couldn’t have said it better.

Holder also has a long history of involvement in charities and nonprofits that seek to stick it to conservatives.

He has been a member of the board of directors of the American Constitution Society. The ACS believes in the myth of the “living” Constitution and views the limits that great charter places on government power as quaint anachronisms to be overcome through clever legal sophistry.

ACS is, of course, funded by the big players in left-wing political finance, including members of the billionaires’ club, the Democracy Alliance. Reliably liberal benefactors of ACS include George Soros’s Open Society Institute ($2,201,500 since 2002), Ford Foundation ($600,000 since 2003), Sandler Foundation ($200,000 in 2003), Tides Foundation ($25,000 since 2002), Barbra Streisand Foundation ($20,000 since 2002).

Meanwhile, it has been exhaustively documented that Holder has what could charitably be called a cavalier approach to a key civil right, you know, that inconvenient, archaic one described in the Second Amendment that the media wishes we would all forget about.

As the Independent Institute’s Stephen P. Halbrook, author of The Founder’s Second Amendment, told a Senate panel considering Holder’s nomination at the beginning of the year, “many Americans have reason to be uneasy about Mr. Holder’s nomination for attorney general. They deserve to have a person in this role who is committed to upholding all parts of the Constitution, including the Second Amendment. Unfortunately, Mr. Holder has proven himself not to be that person.”

As deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, Holder pushed for federal licensing of handgun owners and federal registration of guns, waiting periods for gun purchases, and rationing of handgun sales. The former Janet Reno acolyte signed on to a pro-gun prohibition amicus curiae brief in District of Columbia v. Heller, last year’s groundbreaking Supreme Court case in which justices struck down the District’s oppressive handgun ban.

Like Holder, ACORN has long supported gun control. Content to leave poor people in the inner city defenseless at the hands of violent criminals, ACORN intervened in court to defend a Jersey City, N.J., gun control ordinance.

Bruce Ratner (right) with ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis (at left, partially obscured by megaphone) in an undated photograph.

New York State’s highest court has cleared the way for an ambitious $5 billion taxpayer-funded development to be built in Brooklyn.

On his TV show yesterday Glenn Beck pointed out that a group that claims to protect the interests of poor people, ACORN, helped make possible the deal that will make current inhabitants of the Atlantic Yards project footprint homeless. (See video from the show here.) ACORN has long prided itself on fighting the so-called gentrification of neighborhoods as rising property values force the poor to move.

But not anymore. ACORN sold out in exchange for a bailout.

Specifically, ACORN sold out its own constituents for $1.5 million in loans and grants from project developer Bruce Ratner, whose communist brother Michael Ratner is president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. (The anti-American public interest law firm is also representing ACORN in its vexatious lawsuit in which it claims to have a constitutional right to feed at the taxpayer trough.)

In 2005, ACORN signed an agreement with Forest City Ratner Companies, LLC, a megabucks real estate development firm, pledging its support for the  Atlantic Yards project. The 22-acre mixed-use project will be built in the neighborhood of Prospect Heights and would include the Barclays Center, a proposed sports arena that would become the new home of the New Jersey Nets basketball team.

Forest City Ratner indicated in a letter to ACORN that it would disburse $500,000 in grants but the money wouldn’t go to ACORN directly. The grants were to be made to the ACORN Institute, one of ACORN’s 100-plus tax-exempt nonprofit affiliates.

Whether the money will stay at the ACORN Institute, which trains aspiring community organizers, is anyone’s guess. ACORN routinely shuffles cash around its network. Its nebulous legal status and opaque corporate structure allow it to keep its activities largely hidden from public view.

For all Americans know, ACORN is being funded by the communist government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. It’s not that farfetched an idea.

ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis is friendly with the Marxist anti-American governments of two South American countries.

Within Lewis’s storied rogues gallery of a rolodex may be found contact information for then-Bolivian ambassador Gustavo Guzman and for Sabine Kienzl, a professional propagandist employed by the Venezuelan embassy. The listing for Guzman contains what appears to have been a direct office telephone number.

Add to this a listing in the rolodex for CITGO executive Andres Rangel and the whole picture begins to come into clearer focus.

Remember that CITGO is a wholly owned subsidiary of Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA). PDVSA is owned by the government of Venezuela and has been described as a “black box” because it is believed to also fund Chavez’s overseas political ambitions. Oil export revenues fuel Chavez’s petro-diplomacy.

I don’t have proof that Chavez is funneling money to ACORN but it is not outside the realm of possibility, especially given ACORN’s well-established criminal propensities and convoluted finances.

The despot sends the equivalent of millions of dollars to the U.S. every year as part of his public diplomacy campaign aimed at getting the American public to warm up to his government. Venezuelan oil flows to Citizens Energy Corp., a nonprofit headed by former Rep. Joe Kennedy II (D-Mass.) that gives some of the home heating oil away and sells some at a discount to poor people.

Citizens Energy is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, which means obtaining information about its donors is virtually impossible.

ACORN boss and embezzlement coverup co-conspirator Bertha Lewis spins a yarn about ACORN at Washington, D.C.'s National Press Club yesterday.

The current chief organizer of ACORN, who was up to her eyeballs in the $1 million embezzlement scandal at the embattled radical leftist group, lied and lied and lied some more in an appearance at the National Press Club yesterday.

The contemptible Bertha Lewis, who now prefers to call herself “CEO” of ACORN, gave a “grand performance” at the press club, Glenn Beck said on his TV show Tuesday. Beck’s right. Maybe she should get nominated for an Oscar.

A small sample of the untruths that issued from her mouth:

CLAIM: After news of the embezzlement broke, ACORN “immediately hired outside professionals, no organizers. We may be brilliant organizers, but we needed real financial professionals, real legal professionals, to come in.”

FACT: If ACORN actually hired such people, it has kept evidence of those hirings under wraps. I don’t believe her.

CLAIM: Lewis says ACORN “began the decoupling of over a hundred corporations and organizations under my watch. We took apart that network with transparency and stability.”

FACT: I am not aware of any evidence supporting Lewis’s claim. Prove it, ACORN. Talk is cheap.

CLAIM: “And for nearly 40 years, ACORN has had the privilege to stand with our 500,000 member families fighting for those who typically don’t have a voice.”

FACT: ACORN’s own website says it has “over 400,000 member families,” whatever that means. Yes, 500,000 is more than 400,000, but you can’t just round up from an indefinite figure like “over 400,000.”

Those are just a few of Lewis’ lies from yesterday.

Nor did Lewis say much about her own role in covering up the embezzlement perpetrated by founder Wade Rathke’s brother. After news of the theft broke, Lewis drove out honest ACORN national board members who dared to ask questions.

Lewis, who has high-level contacts within the Marxist governments of Venezuela and Bolivia, also brought out the good ole stand-by smear yesterday, i.e. that everyone who criticizes ACORN is racist. Fortunately, now that the undercover sting videos last month showed Americans the true face of ACORN, the smear, which used to send Republicans and other ACORN critics running, isn’t working too well.

Of course the New York Times highlighted the only part of Lewis’s talk that appealed to it, namely her assertion that ACORN is somehow a victim of a new kind of McCarthyism.  Said Lewis (according to a press club transcript):

The RNC, every single day, because we’ve been inflated as the bogeyman, raises almost $2 million dollars a day every day. And this form of modern day ACORN McCarthyism has got to stop. Last week, members of Congress were asked, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of ACORN?” Everybody should take pause at that. Everybody should say, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. This is not how we have discourse. This is not how we have disagreement in this country, by demonizing someone without due process.” This whole voting to de-fund ACORN, it’s all sensational, but it’s unconstitutional. So all we’re saying is, you know, hold us to a standard of the law. Then hold the folks that made those films to the same standard of the law.