Salient archive post #1: WADE RATHKE: ACORN’S FOUNDER, AYERS’ COMPATRIOT

Editor’s Note: Because Paula Abeles’ special No Quarter Radio guest tonight is David Alinsky, the son of Saul Alinsky, we are republishing articles written during campaigns. This story by Bud White was published in October 2008. Tonight, David Alinsky reminisces about his father’s work and beliefs, and discusses the influences of Saul Alinsky on Barack Obama. Join Paulie at 9:00 p.m. ET and listen live at No Quarter Radio! Call in with questions at (347) 677-0792.

Here’s a brief summary of Saul Alinsky’s relationship to Obama, via Wikipedia: “Alinsky codified and wrote a clear set of rules for community organizing. His rules for radicals are now used as key tactics to learn in the training of new community organizers and were the tactics used by then candidate Barack Obama to win the 2008 election. [...] Alinsky’s teachings influenced Barack Obama in his early career as a community organizer on the far South Side of Chicago. Working for Gerald Kellman’s Developing Communities Project, Obama learned and taught Alinsky’s methods for community organizing.

The lines of evidence now converge: the founder of ACORN is Wade Rathke, who, like William Ayers, was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the student organization founded in 1960 as part of the New Left, was the gateway drug to the Weather Underground. In the early sixties, the SDS was idealistic and many reluctantly supported Lyndon Johnson for president in 1964, and grainy black-and-white pictures show clean-cut men and women registering southern blacks to vote. Tom Hayden was amongst this group. But that was then.

By 1969, their Great Society liberalism had been co-opted by Marxists, Maoists, Spartacists, and other assorted revolutionary groups. They were no longer interested in change, but overthrowing the government. It was during this time that Wade Rathke first came into contact with Bill Ayers.

Much has been made of Obama’s questionable judgment in befriending and working closely with unrepentant terrorist William Ayers. Regardless of what Obama says, his political career was launched in Ayers’ home, Ayers served with him on Woods Fund, and promoted him to head the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

The founder of ACORN, Wade Rathke, like Ayers, is a disciple of Saul Alinsky. Working for ACORN was an important step in Obama’s political career.

An article by Professor David Walls directly connects Rathke’s ACORN to Alinsky, ACORN’s mission of pressuring banks to issue risky mortgages, and the alliance between ACORN and unions:

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, began in 1970 as a spin-off from the National Welfare Rights Organization, founded by George Wiley, who enlisted civil rights workers and trained them in an Alinsky-influenced program at Syracuse University. From a base in Arkansas, Wade Rathke and Gary Delgado developed a replicable model of forming membership organizations and developing leaders in low-income neighborhoods — relying substantially on young middle-class staff working for subsistence wages. ACORN has established local housing corporations to rehabilitate homes, and has successfully pressured banks to provide mortgages and home improvement loans in low-income communities. ACORN has led “living wage” campaigns in many cities, and has forged alliances with labor unions.

But ACORN isn’t just Alinsky-inspired. It’s a direct off-shoot of his revolutionary agenda:

Around 1970 several national networks began to coalesce and develop systematic and distinctive approaches to community organizing. These include the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), ACORN, Citizen Action, National People’s Action, PICO, DART, and the Gamaliel Foundation. Each was indebted, in greater or lesser degree, to Alinsky and his early organizing programs in Chicago through IAF.

Citizen Action, mentioned above, is not “officially” connected to ACORN. But Citizen Action, like Rathke’s ACORN and Ayers’ radical education projects, was founded by another member of the Alinsky-SDS milieu, Heather Booth. But it’s not just SDS and the City of Chicago that binds this group. As the screen capture below shows, Heather Booth’s husband was both a member of the SDS and Alinski’s [sic] Industrial Areas Foundation.

Of equal significance, Citizen Action reported paying Citizen Services, Inc., the shadowy ACORN group first exposed at No Quarter, over half a million dollars for campaign work. This is the Citizen Services, Inc. who has received nearly a million dollars from the Obama campaign:

(Expenditure reports also show an October 18 payment to Citizen Services (ACORN) of $590,526.10 for “Campaign consulting.” This is not enough information to determine whether this payment was also for signature gathering, which would make the per-signature cost ludicrously high, or for get-out-the-vote activities, or something else.)

According to the Associated Press, the FBI is now investigating allegations of voter fraud committed by ACORN. It should come as no surprise that ACORN is steeped in a culture of corruption, and the manipulative actions of ACORN dovetail perfectly with Alinsky’s Rules. Wade Rathke, founder of ACORN, was forced out the organization after his brother, Dale Rathke, embezzled more than $948,000 from ACORN and Wade Rathke covered it up. His brother was running one of the 294 ACORN groups which Larry Johnson discovered are all linked through the same address:

139. CITIZENS CONSULTING INC.
1024 ELYSIAN FIELDS AVE
NEW ORLEANS, LA 70117-8402 NON-PROFIT FOREIGN CORPORATION Name Type:LEGAL
Status:ACTIVE
Indiana Secretary of State

The New York Times reports:

The amount Dale Rathke embezzled, $948,607.50, was carried as a loan on the books of Citizens Consulting Inc., which provides bookkeeping, accounting and other financial management services to Acorn and many of its affiliated entities.

Wade Rathke, prior to Obama’s rapid ascent, was formulating ways to converge the Alinsky Left and take control of the power of the state. This was written in January 2003. He begins his essay with the classic exhortations of a Bolshevik pamphleteer, and his words could not be any clearer:

The oldest cliché of our vast peoples’ movement over the last generation or more has got to be that there are so, so many tasks to be done, that there is a job for everyone – and that means, you, too, brothers and sisters!

~snip~

So, you sit here reading this on the fly between one job and another, home and school, heaven and hell, and you say, “hey, bullshit, no way:” every ad for an “activist” is just looking for a canvasser; all of these groups are just gangs with their own cliques – another secret handshake high school behind a storefront window; and, so, you say, what does it matter what I have to say, what I think, or whatever – I’ll just do my thing, my way, and live my life out of the mainstream

Here’s my plea – let’s build a bridge in the sky that links our worlds together, while allowing us to stay autonomous and anonymous.

First, why, and then, how.

The power of the state is in fact fairly awesome.