WEBCommentary(tm) - ACORN April Fool's Joke: As ACORN Doors Close, Socialism Grows, ACORN's Founder Crows and ACORN Rebrands

Colonel Chandler understood and explained the socialist threat before Election Day 2008, but the liberal media establishment put ACORN's candidate in the White House and big Democrat majorities in control of both houses of Congress. ACORN's mission was accomplished and its agenda is being implemented to the fullest extent possible. The ACORN name is no longer a net plus here in America, so ACORN is rebranding. It's a small price to pay to help Obama implement the ACORN agenda. Tragically (and ironically), the Pimp and Pro ACORN sting that finally made the ACORN name politically toxic allowed Obama to achieve the necessary separation in the eyes of the public to proceed with the ACORN agenda and he will continue to do unless he is effectively exposed in the courtroom of public opinion.

Steve Cobble, co-founder of afterdowningstreet.org, antiwar activist, and radical political strategist, posted this message under the title "Thank You, ACORN" on March 23, 2010 (www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-cobble/thank-you-acorn_b_509868.html):

"Today I just want to say thank you to ACORN, for all the great work you did on behalf of poor people over the past 4 decades.

"Thanks, Wade, Maude, Steve, Bertha, Zach, Carolyn, and so many more of you who worked harder than you had to, made less than you could have, and did more than any other group to make sure the voices of the dispossessed were sometimes included in public policy.

"Thanks for registering so many voters, even though almost all the people you helped elect turned against you on the basis of a videotaped lie, a Swift Boat drive-by shooting, just another FOX fake hit piece.

"Thanks for helping Barack Obama back when he was just an ex-organizer. Thanks for helping Jesse Jackson twice. Thanks for helping start the Working Families Party.

"Thanks for fighting for the homes of poor people, for living wages for working people, for campaign finance reform and voting reforms for all of us. Thanks for doing the gritty, door-to-door work that a field operation requires, and that often gets ignored.

"We'll miss you. Actually, we're gonna find out in November that we'll miss you a lot."

"Wade" is Wade Rathke, ACORN founder and Chief Organizer from 1970 until mid 2008.

In addition to quoting Cobble's post, "Wade" quoted a Houston Chronicle editorial generally praising ACORN as a force for good:

"Meanwhile, what concerns us most is that ACORN’s advocacy for the poor will be orphaned by the demise of the organization.

"For most of its 40 years, ACORN has performed admirably in the trenches – downtrodden neighborhoods across the land whose residents fight daily with the stresses of poverty. As of last week universal health care is a step closer to reality. But who will take up ACORN’s cudgel in the struggle for a livable minimum wage? And affordable housing? And decent neighborhood schools? And access to fair home loans? And on and on. The work is still important. And there is still much to be done. Who will step up to do it?”

"Wade" closed his post with a lesson from both science and political science: "A vacuum has to be filled."

"Comrade Wade" is, among many things, the publisher of Social Justice, which describes itself as follows:

"For over 30 years, Social Policy has served as key site for intellectual exchange among progressive academics and activists from across the United States and beyond, including: Frances Fox Piven, Jonathan Kozol, Noam Chomsky, Marian Wright Edelman, Ivan Illich, Stanley Aronowitz, Michael Lerner, Gloria Steinem, and many more.

"Now published by The Labor Neighbor Research and Training Center in cooperation with the Organizers’ Forum, Social Policy reports on and analyzes contemporary movements for social change in the workplace, the community, and the world.

"Social Policy seeks to inform and report on the work of labor and community organizers who build union and constituency-based groups, run campaigns, and build movements for social justice, economic equality, and democratic participation in the U.S. and around the world."

Francis Fox Piven is a member of the editorial advisory board and best known for helping to formulate the Cloward-Piven strategy set forth in a 1966 article that acknowledged its socialist nature: "The ultimate objective of this strategy—to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income—will be questioned by some. Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redlstribution of income."

Robert Chandler, a retired Air Force colonel and former strategist for the White House, the Departments of State, Defense, Energy and Justice, and the CIA, understood the threat and warned in "The Cloward-Piven Strategy: Using the poor to tear down socialism" (www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/15/the-cloward-piven-strategy/):

"There is plenty blame to go around for the financial crash. Yet, there is a distinct odor of the shadowy Cloward-Piven strategy as the taproot of abusive practices that triggered the crisis. The strategy's goal is to bring about the fall of capitalism by overloading and undermining government bureaucracy.

"Its supporting tactics include flooding government with impossible demands until it slowly cranks to a stop; overloading electoral systems with successive tidal waves of new voters, many of them bogus; shaking down banks, politicians in Congress, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for affirmative-action borrowing; and, now, pulling down the national financial system by demanding exotic, subprime mortgages for low-income Americans with little hope of repaying their loans. These toxic mortgages are an important source of the foul smell engulfing the entire financial bailout.

"Developed in the mid-1960s by two Columbia University sociologists, Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, much of their strategy was drawn from Saul Alinsky, Chicago's notorious revolutionary Marxist community organizer. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) succeeded the National Welfare Rights Organization in the execution of the Cloward-Piven grand tactics of using the poor as cannon fodder to tear down the capitalist system. It was low-income, mostly black and Hispanic people, who were used by ACORN guerrillas to take subprime toxic mortgages.

"An Obama campaign dispatch on October 6 had the right perspective in observing that 'the backward economic philosophy and culture of corruption that helped create the current crisis are looking more and more like any other major financial crisis of our time.' True enough.

"The root causes for the 2008 financial panic were sown some 40 years ago when the Institute for Policy Studies, the notorious 'Think Tank of the Left,' held socialist seminars geared toward undermining the American capitalist system. Beginning in 1964 and continuing to the present day, the Institute for Policy Studies has used seminars especially scoped to influence congressmen and their assistants to support the 'progressive,' that is to say 'socialist,' viewpoint. A 1969 'Housing and Property' seminar, hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies, for example, treated Capitol Hill denizens to mind-stretching leftism. Bringing together speakers from big-city tenants councils, neighborhood legal services, FHA insurance, savings-and-loans entities, and the Shannon and Luchs Realty Company, the Institute for Policy Studies 'plinked' the first domino that led to the current crisis.

"At about the same time that the Institute for Policy Studies was holding the 1969 'Housing and Property' seminars, it was also conducting 'Experimental Education' seminars in January-April 1969, for federal legislators and their aides that included Bill Ayers, an Obama confidant and Weatherman terrorist, as a guest speaker. According to the Senate Subcommittee on Investigation, 4,330 bombings occurred in the United States, about nine a day, from January 1969 to April 1970.

"The socialist test case for using society's poor and disadvantaged people as sacrificial 'shock troops,' in accordance with the Cloward-Piven strategy, was demonstrated in 1975, when new prospective welfare recipients flooded New York City with payment demands, bankrupting the government. As a consequence, New York state also teetered on the edge of financial collapse when the federal government stepped in with a bailout rescue.

"The 2008 financial crisis has all of the earmarks of a Cloward-Piven strategy assault against the capitalist system. Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center recently explained that 'community organizers' (1) 'intimidate banks into making high risk loans to customers with poor credit,' (2) 'occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes,' and, through these thuggish tactics, (3) compel 'financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.' 'In other words,' Mr. Kurtz explained during a presentation at the Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, 'community organizers help to undermine America's economy by pushing the banking system into a sink-hole of bad loans.'

"A key element of the contemporary crisis certainly reflects many years of a 'backward economic philosophy and culture of corruption' cited by the Obama camp. But much of the associated backwardness and deception were secretly peddled by the Institute for Policy Studies. Its war against the financial system used improvised non-ethical devices (INEDs) designed to destroy capitalism and support Mr. Obama. One of those roadside INEDs was the Cloward-Piven strategy."

Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.

Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.

The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.

Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.