ACORN’S Enron-Style Accounting: Playing Musical Chairs with Big Money

Please read these articles and then ask yourself why Majority Leader Reid of the US Senate is blocking the investigation into ACORN? Is it because he knows the Democrats have been winning seats in Congress with ACORN Voter Fraud funded by the US Taxpayers? Maybe Reid is afraid without ACORN he will lose his seat in the Senate. Food for thought as you read the ever growing scandal of ACORN and our tax dollars at work with ACORN fraud.

Keep in mind that this President has strong ties within ACORN and as a community organizer worked with them in Chicago and gave ACORN at last count almost $1M from his campaign to help organize. What did they organize? Voter Fraud? When ACORN voter fraud happened in Oklahoma, you can bet it was pretty much everywhere. How many years has ACORN been part of voter fraud? Does it go back to 1992 when Clinton won the close race? Was Ross Perot's candidacy used to cover up the voter fraud. We know that ACORN was involved in the 2008 MN Senate race and we saw what happened there. How about in FL in 2000? Just how many seats have been picked up by Democrats due to ACORN voter fraud? Our guess is that we will never know but when you have over 100% voting in any precinct, it shouts voter fraud.

Bottom Line is that the American taxpayers have a right to a full accounting and investigation of this corrupt organization like yesterday. Vote out anyone standing in the way of a full accounting and investigation. #1 candidate to defeat -- Sen Harry Reid of Nevada who is stalling an investigation in the Senate.

ACORN’S Enron-Style Accounting: Playing Musical Chairs with Big Money biggovernment.com
Sept. 25, 2009
Matthew Vadum

The activities of the radical, corrupt to the core, left-wing Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now [1], which has tangled itself up in an infinitely complex web of deceit, thuggery, and questionable financial dealings, are long overdue for a RICO probe.

Recent well-publicized events that I need not recount here show ACORN’s criminal propensities. In a moment I’ll explain how ACORN’s financial affairs ought to raise a red flag for investigators at the U.S. Department of Justice, but first some background.

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which was created to prosecute organized crime, allows the federal government to go after individuals who commit any two RICO-related crimes over a decade. The law allows courts to convict persons if it can be shown that they committed those crimes as part of an illegal enterprise and can order disgorgement of their ill-gotten gains from the enterprise.
RICO is the right tool for the job.

Perhaps it’s the only tool for the job because the ACORN network is deliberately structured to deter scrutiny. Its nebulous legal status and opaque corporate structure allow it to keep its activities largely hidden from public view.
The social justice entrepreneurs of ACORN sit on the boards of ACORN and of ACORN affiliates. Many, many, many of them.

These “interlocking directorates” create an appearance of conflict of interest. Such arrangements may be widespread and lawful, but they always raise legitimate questions about the quality and independence of board decision-making. The ACORN network claims to be a “family” of organizations embodying the ethos of community organizing, which stresses local action and decentralized authority.
In fact, ACORN is tightly controlled from the top. One blogger discovered last year that 294 ACORN affiliates [2] operate out of ACORN’s building on Elysian Fields Avenue in New Orleans.

(Excerpt) Read more at biggovernment.com

UPDATE:

GOP's Vitter: Reid 'Thumbing His Nose' at Calls to Investigate ACORN
September 24, 2009 7:26 PM
By: Jim Meyers

Sen. David Vitter tells Newsmax that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is "thumbing his nose" at the American people by refusing to push for stern action against scandal-plagued ACORN.

Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, also said the community organizing group's lawsuit against the young couple who took now infamous hidden-camera videos of ACORN staffers is a "slap in the face of the First Amendment."

See Video: Sen. David Vitter talks about his calls to defund scandal-plagued ACORN and save taxpayer money - Click Here Now

Vitter was elected to the U.S. House in 1999, then to the Senate in 2004, and he is up for re-election next year.

Newsmax.TV's Ashley Martella noted that Vitter has been "locking horns" with Democrat Reid over ACORN, the acronym for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Congress recently voted to cut off federal funds to the group after the videos came to light showing ACORN workers giving tax and other advice to the couple, who were posing as a prostitute and a pimp trying to open a brothel.

Martella asked: "What is it you're asking Reid to do that he refuses to do?"

The senator said: "I wrote the majority leader, Senator Reid, and said that he should ask every relevant Senate committee to hold investigations into this.

"ACORN receives tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money on a regular basis, and certainly all of these news stories absolutely call for investigation and for action. And so I asked him to order the relevant Senate committees to initiate those investigations.

"He wrote back and basically said no, we're doing more important stuff. We can't waste our time on that, which I think is really thumbing his nose at the American people, who obviously share this concern about ACORN."

Read More at Newsmax.com

UPDATE:

Grassley: ACORN Uses Tax-Exempt Entities to Funnel Money to Itself
HumanEvents.com
9/25/2009
Connie Hair

ACORN is using a tangled web of tax-exempt organizations to funnel tax money to itself according to a detailed review released last night by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee.

Some or all of them may be nothing more than shell companies used to pass money from the government directly through to ACORN and its affiliates.

“This analysis regarding the vast number of charitable organizations that ACORN set up to funnel money to itself raises questions about whether ACORN used the entities to advance the charitable mission of helping poor people get housing, or whether the entities were used as part of a shell game to funnel charitable funds to a taxable entity,” Grassley said of his report.

“Despite the fact that ACORN set up 42 tax-exempt entities and even housed 31 of them at the same address in New Orleans, ACORN told me three times in 2006 and 2007 that it did not operate as a tax-exempt entity. The public deserves an accounting of ACORN’s conglomerate of tax-exempt organizations given the public dollars involved, both through direct government support and tax-exempt status.”
Grassley also said that the potential abuse of charitable dollars is no different than Jack Abramoff’s use of charities to launder money but on a much larger scale.

From the report:

"Our research indicates that ACORN’s response that it is not tax-exempt is disingenuous and misleading. Millions of charitable dollars from individuals, foundations and federal, state, and local governments flow to ACORN and its related taxable entities from ACORN-affiliated charitable organizations. A memo prepared for ACORN executives, which was provided to us anonymously, confirms the existence of numerous charitable organizations. The memo dated June 19, 2008, details issues regarding governance and commingling of funds, among other things." The analysis prepared by Grassley’s professional tax staff at the Senate Committee on Finance and posted with supporting documents on their websites: http://finance.senate.gov/ and http://grassley.senate.gov/

UPDATE:

Reid blocks ACORN probe
Las Vegas Review-Journal
September 25, 2009

ACORN -- the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- is stinking up Washington.

And this is far more significant than if a suspiciously large number of operatives for a purely "private" outfit had been found systematically bending and breaking the law, because ACORN receives and spends taxpayer money -- lots of it -- and had carried the imprimatur of official partnerships with the IRS, the Census Bureau ... the kind of "cred" that in the political world comes only from "who you know."

(Excerpt) Read more at lvrj.com