ACORN’s Wade Rathke

ACORN's Wade Rathke:
Muscle for Money and Your Votes for Free

http://deathby1000papercuts.com/2010/10/acorns-wade-rathke-muscle-for-money-and-your-votes-for-free/

Meet ACORN founder, Wade Rathke: mysterious, controversial,
in-your-face community organizer and, some would say, corrupter of
elections for power and profit. Michael Volpe interviews the man behind ACORN.

October 8, 2010
by Michael Volpe

"The critics would say that Project Vote voter registration drives
are used selectively only in those areas favorable to candidates that
ACORN endorses and supports."

Wade Rathke, who leaned back for most of the interview, leaned
forward as this question was asked. "We cater to low and moderate
income, black and Latinos. Is it my fault that one party has totally
alienated all those groups? We do voter registration to our
constituency. Period."

Rathke continued, "If we were to do registration drives, would it
make any sense to go to Wilmette, Winnetka, Lake Forest, and
Glenview, (four of the wealthiest suburbs of Chicago) or would we
come to Englewood and Austin? (The poorest neighborhoods of Chicago)"

ACORN, the community organization that Wade Rathke founded and led
for nearly four decades, is a 501(c)4 and that allows it to endorse
specific candidates. Project Vote, one of the three hundred plus
affiliates that ACORN created, is a 501 © 3 and isn't allowed to
endorse. One of the many charges critics make against Rathke and
ACORN is that Project Vote voter registration drives are organized
only in areas in which the voters are sympathetic to the candidates
ACORN itself endorses. By so doing, Project Vote is in effect engaged
in partisan activities not allowed of a 501©3. To hear Rathke explain
it, the voter registration drives are necessary constituent services,
and political reality, not a conspiracy, explains why they more often
than not benefit an ACORN backed candidate. This one controversy is
emblematic of the mystery and intrigue that is Wade Rathke. For every
nefarious charge, there's Wade Rathke to offer a perfectly innocent
explanation.

Rathke has been a force in community organizing for four decades and
yet he continues to be an enigma wrapped up in a riddle. Is he the
cold blooded radical hell bent on the destruction of America that
critics like Glenn Beck contend? Is he the heroic community organizer
that's spent his life championing the poor and middle class that his
supporters contend? Is he the "organic genius" that ACORN 8 member
Marcel Reid contends? Is he a combination of all of those?

The only thing that is beyond debate is that Rathke maintains an
affable and pleasant demeanor which makes him a uniquely gifted
communicator. Matt Vadum of the Capital Research Center agrees with
that assessment. He's a D.C. based journalist and a frequent critic
of ACORN. He saw Rathke at a book signing at the D.C. bookstore
Busboys and Poets in the fall of 2009. "I walked out thinking I'd
like to have a beer with Wade Rathke" says Vadum of his immediate
impression following the signing. Despite being impressed with
Rathke's affable nature, Vadum continues to be a critic of ACORN.
Strip away all the ideology, politics, and controversy and the secret
to Rathke's success is his extraordinary skills as a communicator.
Like all great salespeople, preachers, and motivational speakers,
Rathke is blessed with the gift of gab.

Besides this, Rathke's world is like one of those pictures that's
full of dots that looks like a ship from the right angle. What you
see depends entirely on your perspective. He's been linked to the
likes of William Ayers, George Soros and Abby Hoffman and Rathke says
he's never met any of them. Ask him about charges of commingling,
misuse of funds, and fraud at ACORN and Rathke forcefully replies
that under his leadership ACORN was audited each and every year and
every year they were given a financial clean bill of health. Ask him
about charges that the structure of the multi hundred ACORN
affiliates was created to deceive and confuse and Rathke forcefully
replies that no one makes such charges when a Bank of America,
Citigroup, or Microsoft creates also create hundreds of sub
corporations. For every charge of criminality, radicalism, and
dangerous ideology, Rathke has a forceful answer. You're left stuck
in a world part Woodstock part Usual Suspects.

The story of Wade Rathke begins in Williams College in Boston in the
late 1960's. After his sophomore year, Rathke found work organizing
for a group that those looked to inform folks about the Vietnam
draft. Rathke quickly became disenchanted in the role. He said he
thought he was going to help poor inner city blacks get informed
about their rights. Instead, he wound up mostly working with wealthy
white suburbanites looking to manipulate the system.

While his initial experience in organizing was far from perfect, this
stint caught the eye of George Wiley, the chief organizer for the
National Welfare Rights Organization. In 1969, Wiley offered for
Rathke to start an organizing office for NWRO in Massachusetts. A
year later, Rathke was moved to Arkansas. By 1970, Rathke's vision
was growing bigger than NWRO. He'd quickly created twelve affiliates:
everything from tenant rights, living wage, social justice along with
welfare rights. NWRO had a myopic vision. They wanted to focus on
organizing welfare recipients. Rathke saw that vision as limited.
After all, only a small portion of the population is on welfare and
the public at large usually dislikes those people anyway. So, he
presented his vision to the board. He didn't know it then but the
vision he presented would grow to what is now called the Association
for Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). It was a full
service community organizing enterprise tailored to serve all the
needs of the low and middle class. Rathke says that Wiley liked his
vision but the rest of the board didn't take to it. So, in 1970 Wade
Rathke broke off and created the Arkansas Community Organization for
Reform Now.

His first campaign in the new organization was furniture for
families. Under then Republican governor Winthrop Rockefeller the
state of Arkansas set aside money for furniture for poor folks, and
ACORN fought on their behalf to maximize that program. It was an
important campaign because as Rathke said, "If your first campaign
fails, there is no second campaign." ACORN found a warehouse and saw
to it that thousands of Arkansas' poor received furniture. With that,
ACORN took off. The state is small enough that everyone soon knows
everyone else. In 1972, the 24 year old Rathke met and befriended a
24 Arkansan working for the campaign of George McGovern, Bill
Clinton. A lifelong friendship began.

The first national campaign for ACORN involved homesteading and with
that the organization began spreading through the nation. By the mid
1970's ACORN was gaining national traction and so Arkansas was
replaced by Association and the main office was moved from Little
Rock to New Orleans in 1978. Rathke's organizing empire was growing
as well. He started the local United Labor Unions Local 100 in New
Orleans in 1980. He merged that with the SEIU in 1984. Rathke was one
of the three founding directors along with Drummond Pike of the Tides
Foundation in 1977.

ACORN continued to grow throughout the 1980's and 1990's. In 1992,
Arkansas' favorite son, Bill Clinton, became president of the entire
United States. Rathke says he can still remember a front page photo
in the Washington Post of Clinton, on the day after the election,
giving then (and still) ACORN political director Zac Pollet a "big
bear hug". "We thought he was the best choice in 1992" Rathke said of
Clinton, and "there was never a campaign we (ACORN) didn't support
him (Clinton)" So, just as Bill Clinton had arrived on the national
scene, so too, ACORN's reach and scope had taken a giant step forward.

The growth continued. Rathke estimates that the organization had
offices in 40 states by the time he left in 2008. ACORN worked in
nearly all areas of society: housing, accounting, voter registration,
worker's rights. Rathke even started both a radio and television
station for ACORN. Still, ACORN remained relatively anonymous outside
the community organizing world until 2006, when voter fraud
allegations first surfaced. Then, in the summer of 2008, the New York
Times broke the story that Wade's brother Dale had embezzled almost
$1 million from ACORN affiliate Citizen's Consulting Inc. Since,
controversy has engulfed the group and it reached its zenith last
fall when two enterprising journalists, James O'Keefe and Hannah
Giles, posed as a "pimp" and "prostitute" in a number of ACORN
offices and were successful in getting the staff to give them advice
on ways to hide their illegal activities. These days both ACORN and
Rathke are a magnet for controversy and everything both do is under
the proverbial microscope. Nothing about Rathke, ACORN, or the
controversies that surround them is simple or tidy. For every
accusation, there's an equally forceful response. Often, the same
people critical of Rathke on one issue will be equally forceful
defenders on another. Controversies are never neatly tied. They often
overlap with issues of power, corruption and transparency often being
a common thread. Every controversy is like a spider's web, with roots
and tentacles in other controversies. All go to the heart of who Wade
Rathke is and what he's accomplished. Depending on whom you believe,
or your perspective, something is either entirely innocent or totally
nefarious. For instance ACORN's most controversial affiliate, Citizen
Consulting Inc., has been called by Vadum and other critics ACORN's
"financial nerve center" and its bookkeeper by Rathke. It's a hall of
mirrors with no easy answers or conclusions, only endless fascination.

Even what Rathke does, community organizing, is a source of
controversy. Rathke described community organizing like this,
"community organizing allows people to create an organization which
fired by their participation and fueled by their voices, is able to
build collective power through their concerted activity which engages
their full citizenship, rights longstanding grievances, cries for
change, and speaks to their aspirations and dreams for the future."
Vadum, however, applies a more nefarious intention to Rathke's
profession, "Rathke is endorsing Saul Alinsky's "People's
Organization" concept. Alinsky believed in building multi-issue
activist groups that would serve as armies of change, agitating and
stirring up trouble in order to extort deep-pocketed businesses and
in the process generate social, economic, and political upheaval in
society. Rathke, the father of ACORN, does not endorse "democracy" in
the American sense of the term; he embraces mob rule."

The controversy only starts there. The biggest controversy surrounds
the near million dollar embezzlement by Wade's brother Dale from
Citizen Consulting Incorporate, when Dale was its CEO. Starting in
1999 and going until at least 2001, Dale Rathke looted the
organization of about one million dollars. Rathke neither offers
excuses or apologies for his brother's behavior. Instead, he says
this of discovering his brother's embezzlement, "once it was
discovered, we had two choices restitution or retribution". By this,
Rathke means that ACORN had two choices: have Dale Rathke pay the
money back or report him to the police. They chose the first. Beyond
that though, details of the embezzlement were only shared with a very
select group of top Rathke deputies. All swore to secrecy and the
only reason news of the embezzlement is a matter of public record is
because it was discovered by another staffer and leaked to the New
York Times in 2008.

The handling of the aftermath of Dale Rathke's embezzlement is
central to the controversy that surrounds ACORN and Rathke. When I
asked him how he normally chooses which campaigns to put the
organization's time into, he replied, "Oh, I usually take a vote and
go with the membership." Michael McCray, media director for ACORN 8
and a board member of ACORN from 2003-2008, disagrees with that
assertion, "Yes, there's a vote" but McCray continues, "What winds up
happening is that the organizers steer the issues". (McCray and other
current and former members of ACORN's board started ACORN 8, a group
looking to reform ACORN) Whereas Rathke presents a group that
empowers it members and respects its input, McCray sees this as
largely a myth. Instead, McCray believes the organization largely
centers its power in the hands of organizers, each city has a chief,
and all those organizers answer to ACORN's chief organizer, the
position Rathke held from 1970-2008. So, in fact, McCray believes
that ACORN really only empowered one person under Rathke's
leadership, Rathke himself.

If ACORN really does empower all its members, why then was the
embezzlement only shared with a select few? Rathke says that in any
organization some decisions are made at the top. Rathke said that had
the entire membership been made aware news of the embezzlement would
have been leaked and ACORN's enemies would have used the news to
demonize the organization unfairly. As it is, that happened anyway.

This ideological dispute over the true nature of ACORN is at the
heart of many of its controversies. Much has been of the numerous
ACORN affiliates: names like Project VOTE, ACORN Housing, and ACORN
Social Justice. Rathke compares all of these to spin off companies
like Delphi and Lucent, spun off from General Motors and AT&T
respectively. Still, there have been over three hundred identified
and all have all sorts of different tax structures (be it 501 © 3, 4,
or otherwise) Tracking the money becomes quite a chore, even if
there's nothing untoward happening. Rathke insists that everything
was always on the up and up and everything was disclosed to the
board. Michael McCray disagrees, "the board was never made aware of
the affiliates" and "the board was never provided with proper tax
returns to track the money". Both are thoughts echoed by Marcel Reid
another ACORN 8 member (who served on the national board of ACORN for
three years) and Karen Inman (Inman served on the board of ACORN from
2003-2008). Reid says that the first she heard that ACORN had any
affiliates was at the same July 16th, 2008 ACORN board meeting at
which Rathke himself was removed. That's when ACORN attorney
Elizabeth Kingsley presented the board with a list of about 100
affiliates that Kingsley had uncovered. "We were shocked" Reid said
of seeing the list. Reid, who lead the Interim Management Committee
which investigated ACORN internally following the ouster of Rathke in
the summer of 2008, said this, "it was only after we did the
investigation that we discovered (the full extent of) all these
organizations."

With all these affiliates, there is yet another controversy. While
Rathke insists that all these organizations are legally separate,
they are certainly tied together ideologically. Often, they team up
on campaigns. Often, employees of one wind up working at another.
Sometimes, members of the board of one wind up on the board of
another. Another controversy surrounds the allegation that
individuals are installed on boards of any number of ACORN affiliates
without their knowledge. "I don't know of any instance in which
someone was on a board without their knowledge" Rathke told me. "I
can think of five occasions where someone was on the board of an
affiliate and they didn't know it". Reid countered and she said that
on one occasion that board member was Carol Hemingway, who currently
serves as ACORN's treasurer.

The affiliates were only one source of controversy for ACORN. Over
the last three decades, ACORN has waged numerous battles with
Wal-Mart over both unionization and wages. In fact, in his book
Citizen Wealth, Rathke offered a platform for unionizing Wal-Mart
outside the normal process of unionization. . He said that he
successfully implemented that plan in Florida. Of course, Wal-Mart's
business model is based on economies of scale. That means that all
goods are bought as cheaply as possible, sold with razor thin margin,
and then profits are created by enormous volume. How does that square
with Rathke's demand that Wal-Mart pay everyone a "living wage"?
Rathke says that providing all their employees with a living wage
would amount to "a rounding error" in the balance sheet and bottom
line of Wal-Mart.

ACORN's role in the financial meltdown is another source of
controversy. Mostly that surrounds their role in creating and
implementing the Community Reinvestment Act. Thomas Woods, in his
book Meltdown, listed the CRA as the second biggest culprit (behind
the Federal Reserve) of the financial meltdown. In a February 2010
report in the House Oversight Committee lead by Congressman Darrell
Issa, the report concluded, "ACORN used provisions in the CRA of 1977
that allowed community groups to challenge bank mergers and
acquisitions if a bank did not adequately invest in its own
community. These challenges, which featured ACORN's standard of
intimidation tactics, successfully forced banks to make lending
agreements with ACORN Housing. If banks refused ACORN's demands, they
jeopardized approval of mergers in a timely manner. ACORN Housing
moved to become the conventional service provider for the loans.
ACORN reaped profits from over a billion dollars in loans to low
income neighborhoods. Because of the policies and financial
instruments developed in part through ACORN lobbying activities,
borrowers eventually defaulted on the loans. The end result was
bursting the housing bubble."

Rathke dismisses the finding out of Issa's committee out of hand,
"Capitol Police need to give the researchers on Issa's committee a
field sobriety test." Rathke doesn't dispute ACORN's role in
cultivating CRA at all stages, "we were a part of it at every level"
but Rathke disputes the results of that involvement, "the loans that
were part of the portfolio brought by ACORN were some of the top
performing loans at such banks as Citigroup, Bank of America, and
Countrywide." Rathke also added, "It's not thuggery to help banks
expand their profits and giv to more Americans for home ownership."

On this issue, Rathke finds frequent critic, Michael McCray, a
supporter. McCray, who spent almost five years in urban development
for the USDA, calls the CRA, "a monumental piece of legislation". He
says its purpose has been perverted by many conservatives. McCray
says that the CRA was borne out of the 1960's and early 1970's when
banks "redlined". That's the process by which banks would identify
entire neighborhoods, usually minority and always poor, and refuse to
give any loans in that neighborhood no matter how strong the credit
profile. The CRA identified these neighborhoods and required banks
that were physically located in them to put a certain percentage of
their funds back into the neighborhood through loans. McCray
dismisses the assertion by Issa, Woods, and other conservatives like
Sean Hannity that the CRA had any substantive effect on the mortgage crisis.

McCray and the rest of ACORN 8 also defend Rathke on another issue,
muscle for money. In the Issa report, Muscle for Money was described
this way, "Muscle for Money involves using non profit corporations
for electioneering activities and an SEIU strategy to threaten
corporations and banks into brokering deals for ACORN's financial
benefit. SEIU and Project Vote used litigation to force demands from
government officials. ACORN, through Project Vote, threatened
Secretary of State's offices with lawsuits, thus forcing political
compromises at the expense of the tax payers".

Rathke counters, "Muscle for Money is a colorful expression but I
don't know that there's a specific campaign that they can point to
and say that's Muscle for Money." Meanwhile, ACORN 8 dismisses Muscle
for Money entirely as something dreamed up by a disgruntled former
employee of Project Vote named Anita Moncrief. Moncrief didn't
respond for comment for this article.

Whereas for those like Vadum the controversy over Rathke begins
(though not necessarily ends) at ideology, that's not the case for
ACORN 8. ACORN 8 are all former board members of ACORN. They all
believe in the mission of ACORN. For them the questions of
transparency, power, and corruption at ACORN are all intertwined.
Their disputes with Rathke cut to the heart of who Rathke is. If you
were to believe every accusation made by those in ACORN 8, that would
make Rathke ruthless, corrupt, and brilliant all at once. If you all
the members of ACORN 8, Wade Rathke created a group that he claimed
empowered its members when in fact it only empowered himself, and
that was the plan from the beginning. Rathke says that ACORN was
always transparent on his watch, the power was spread, and thus there
was no corruption. Every member of ACORN 8 that I spoke with denied
this vociferously. Karen Inman summed it up, "the only information
that we (the board) received was information that Wade (Rathke)
wanted us to have, that fit his agenda," For instance, while Rathke
has been running the local SEIU since 1980, Inman said that wasn't
revealed to her on the board until late in her term, "I didn't know
(Rathke) was head of the local SEIU until things hit the fan (in the
summer of 2008)" said Inman.

As such, the critics charge that there's a cult of (Wade Rathke)
personality. "There is no cult of personality" Rathke told me, "do
you really think that from New Orleans (Rathke's base), I can control
the day to day decisions of a local office in Minneapolis or
Atlanta?" In fact, that's exactly what all those in ACORN 8 said he
was doing. All described an ACORN structure in which local organizers
controlled everything: money, information, meetings, at each local
office, and all the local organizers answered to the chief organizer,
Wade Rathke. Meanwhile, they all described the board of ACORN as
largely sycophants. Inman says that on one occasion ACORN President
Maude Hurd referred to Rathke as "my boss" even though technically
Rathke would answer to the board.

This environment would be easy to exploit and corrupt and that's
especially true when you consider the fact that ACORN has created
over three hundred affiliates, each with its own bank account. That's
why disclosure is so critical, and the dichotomy between the
recollections of Rathke and ACORN 8 couldn't be more divergent.
Rathke says that the board was always made aware when an affiliate
was created and always given the proper financial statements, but
that's an assertion that every person I spoke with at ACORN 8
vociferously denies. Only Inman offered a nuance response, "maybe
Wade disclosed an audit to some on the board like Maude Hurd but
never to me". Inman joined Reid on the interim management council
which investigated ACORN internally following the disclosure of Dale
Rathke's embezzlement, and she said her role in the investigation was
like discovering a whole new organization even though she'd been on
the board for five years. All this mystery and confusion leads all of
ACORN 8 to demand a full forensic audit. If you think that direct
demand can finally lead to a climax in the story of Wade Rathke, he's
quick to remind that he's no longer involved in ACORN and directs all
such requests to its current chief organizer Bertha Lewis. Then, he
reminds me that a full audit was conducted every year he was chief
organizer, an assertion ACORN 8 denies, and on and on we go. ACORN
itself didn't' respond for comment for this article.

As for today's ACORN controversies, Rathke offers no excuses for the
behavior of ACORN employees in the now infamous videos. He does
however say that conservatives "smelled blood in the water" after the
tapes were released, and that ACORN is a target because "it's the
biggest organization dedicated the advancement of poor middle class
Americans". If Rathke would have handled things differently, he's not
saying. He says that he doesn't want to be a critic from the outside.
Still, it's hard not to notice that in 38 years at the helm ACORN
went from an organization of one to half a million, and then in two
years following it's imploded and now exists on paper only.

Despite all the controversy that surrounds Rathke, he has not only
survived but thrived. Ask Rathke how things are going and he
typically responds, "Every day is an adventure". That's still the
case for Rathke into his 60's. While his former organization is
disintegrating, Rathke continues to evolve. Rathke is currently the
chief organizer of ACORN International, known domestically as
Community Organizations International. It has offices in seven
countries on five continents. He's still the Chief Organizer of the
local SEIU in New Orleans. He still publishes his magazine, Social
Policy, four times yearly. He's still a senior board member on the
Tides Foundation. At 63, he still travels most of the world, going
regularly to the Dominican Republic, Africa, and India. For better or
worse, Rathke plans on spending the remaining years of his life
implementing his ACORN vision to an organization that will have
influence the world over. When asked if he thought his name would one
day be used like Alinsky, as a verb in community organizing, Rathke
simply responded, "yes". Rathke remains mysterious, controversial,
but never boring.

.