Why is the Obama administration defying federal law by funding ACORN?
Judicial Watch discovered that the president is flouting the will of Congress by surreptitiously giving federal taxpayer money to ACORN, his former employer and legal client. This is the first such grant to surface this year but more are certain to follow.
Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) gave a $79,819 grant to a Florida office of the largest branch of the ACORN tree, the massive conglomerate known as ACORN Housing Corp. (AHC). AHC filed papers last year legally changing its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA). Despite the nifty new moniker, it’s the same old corrupt, antisocial organization.
As I wrote in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, ACORN Housing grew out of crime: trespassing. It emerged from a 1982 squatting campaign in which ACORN built a squatters’ tent city behind the White House. Rampaging ACORN activists break in and illegally occupy property already owned by others – and your tax dollars subsidize this criminal activity.
The secretary of HUD is Shaun Donovan. Donovan and ACORN are tight. (Donovan and ACORN’s then-chief organizer Bertha Lewis are seen in the above screen grab from footage shot for the documentary film Battle for Brooklyn.)
“Perhaps no administration official has had more interaction with ACORN than” Donovan, the New York Times has reported. Reinforcing the newspaper’s point, ACORN’s Bertha Lewis praised the HUD secretary. “We grew to respect him, and he grew to respect us,” she said.
Roll Call said Lewis admitted “ACORN has friends in high places for the first time in a long time.” She acknowledged “that she has particularly good relationships with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan and with Patrick Gaspard, the White House political director.”
Donovan’s close ties to ACORN might help to explain why the cabinet member went into overdrive two years ago publicly distancing himself from the group. That’s around the time Big Government began promoting the undercover brothels-for-pedophiles videos that showed ACORN employees giving two conservative activists helpful advice on how to break the law without getting caught.
No doubt Donovan was personally involved in making sure ACORN landed this new grant.
Moving along, it needs to be said that the $79,819 HUD grant that has gone to ACORN funds a political agitation and indoctrination program. Saul Alinsky himself couldn’t have devised better euphemisms than the ones HUD uses to describe the program:
Education and Outreach Initiative grants (EOI) – HUD awarded $6.8 million to organizations that educate the public and housing providers about their rights and obligations under federal, state, and local fair housing laws. Groups will also conduct fair lending workshops, community meetings, and individual counseling activities focused on homeowners at risk for discrimination.
According to HUD, the grant money came out of fiscal 2010 appropriations.
That’s a big problem.
As I reported previously, in 2009 Congress passed four separate appropriations measures that contained language blocking federal funds from flowing to ACORN during federal fiscal year 2010, which ran from Oct. 1, 2009 through Sept. 30, 2010. All four of the laws prevent ACORN and its affiliated groups from receiving federal taxpayer dollars.
The funding prohibition in Public Law 111-117 (PDF) applies specifically to HUD. It spells out in pretty clear terms that ACORN shouldn’t be getting any government funding. Let’s see just how clearly it spells it out:
Division A – Section 418. None of the funds made available under this Act or any prior Act may be provided to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, or allied organizations. [p. 80 of PDF]
Division B – Section 534. None of the funds made available under this Act may be distributed to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) or its subsidiaries. [p. 125 of PDF]
Division E – Section 511. None of the funds made available in this division or any other division in this Act may be distributed to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) or its subsidiaries. [p. 279 of PDF]
Yet despite the ban, President Obama, who worked for ACORN as an employee and as the group’s lawyer, found it in his heart to hand over $79,819 of your money to his thug friends at ACORN.
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America needs to know that ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer. These radical leftists who use the brutal, in-your-face, Machiavellian pressure tactics of Saul Alinsky want to destroy America as we know it and will use any means to do it.
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