Acorn and its ties to the unions

ACORN Covering Up Its Ties To SEIU?

A photo retrieved from SEIU Local 100’s website today. The original photo caption reads: “Organizers from Local 100, ACORN, and SEIU, supporters and attorneys celebrate our victory on February 3, 2002.” The man with the sandy hair to the right of the microphones is Wade Rathke, founder and then-chief organizer of ACORN.

ACORN, which until recently proudly listed locals 100 and 880 of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) as ACORN affiliates, has scrubbed its website.

As of right now, the allied organizations section on the ACORN website makes no mention of the group’s ties to SEIU.

As of April 20, the day before Kevin Mooney’s article on ACORN and its ties to unions ran in the Washington Examiner, the ACORN website page contained short blurbs on SEIU Locals 100 and 880 and their respective logos. I made a PDF of the page on Oct. 30, 2008. You may look at the PDF file here. From the same website, here is a copy that I made on Oct. 24, 2008 of an official list of ACORN’s affiliates, a document called “ACORN, ACORN Affiliate, and COUNCIL Offices.” 

Moreover, SEIU Local 100’s most recent publicly available IRS Form 990 shows ACORN founder Wade Rathke as that local’s chief organizer (see page 5 of PDF).

What is ACORN afraid of?

NOTE: The Washington Examiner has just reported on ACORN’s cyber sleight-of-hand. For background information on ACORN, please see the November 2008 issues of Foundation Watch and Labor Watch.

Matthew Vadum  Bio

Matthew Vadum Most recent columns Source: Capital Research Center Matthew Vadum is Editor of Organization Trends and Foundation Watch, two monthly newsletters published by Capital Research Center, a Washington D.C.-based think tank that focuses on the politics of philanthropy. He has appeared on “Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric,” “O’Reilly Factor,” “America’s Nightly Scoreboard,” “G. Gordon Liddy Show,” “Michael Reagan Show,” “Janet Parshall’s America,” “The Lars Larson Show,” “Greg Knapp Experience,” “Politics of Money,” “Glenn Beck” and has been published in the Washington Times, Boston Herald, Las Vegas Review Journal, American Spectator, Human Events. Matthew can be reached at: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)